Always format cells general to text in Excel

Question

I am using Microsoft Excel 2010. In that after entering the values for example if i enter "01234" and give enter it changes to "1234". The "0" is getting eliminated. To solve this issue i ll do the following procedure

Right click on the cell --> format cells --> Number Tab --> choose Text in category column.

I hate this process to do often. Is there any solution to predefine it meaning it should always be in "text" whenever i open a new workbook.

Answer 1

You can refer to this link to do what you want: http://www.pchelps.com/2011/03/productivity-101-setting-up-excel-default-formatting/

Basically, open a workbook and format it in the way you want. Then save that as your template.

An alternative to making your format Text is to use custom formatting. For example if you know that your number will always have 5 digits (sometimes with leading 0s), you can do a custom format with 00000. In this way, even when you enter manually 123 into the cell, it will be formatted as 00123