15 digit number limitation non-text workaround?

It's not the process of saving the data as a tab delimited file that does the
damage.

If you open that text file in Notepad or your favorite text editor, you'll see
the data is still very nice.

But depending on how you open the file in excel, you may see the damage.

I'd make sure that the tab delimited file is named *.txt (anything but *.CSV)
and then open excel.

Then use File|open to open the text file. 

You'll see a wizard where you can specify the type for each field.  Don't use
General for these long numeric entries -- use Text.

Superman64232 wrote:

Everyone knows that Excel has a 15 digit limitation when it comes to numbers, and that after 15 digits, it simply replaces everything with 0's. Most people should also know that changing the cell format to text alleviates this problem nicely. However, this is a patch, not a cure, and I'm having a big issue.

*I have a list of product codes that are 20-25 digits long, and an inventory company that requires our inventory lists to be sent to them in a Tab Delimited format. This is the rub. I can view and manipulate our product codes in Excel by changing the formatting to Text, but when you convert to a Tab Delimited file, it strips all formatting.  The numbers are no longer seen as text, and are converted to the 15 digit cut-off. *

*Anyone know a work-around? *

--

Dave Peterson