How to save a number as a String in Excel?

Question

How to save a number as a String in Excel?

When I try to enter a number, 00112233, Excel automatically formats it as 112233 and saving it as number. But I want the preceeding 0's not to be truncated and save the number as string.

As a workaround I'm using quotes ("") to save the actual string.

Any suggestion...??

Answer 1

If you pre-format the input cells with TEXT format you can just enter 00112233 or whatever and it will display as entered and be stored as text. To do that select a cell or range of cells and right click - in dialog box choose "Format Cells" and then in the next box choose Number > Text

Note you can't change to TEXT format after input, or rather you can change the format but it has no effect!

Answer 2

If you put a single quote in front of the number, it will be stored as text.