Why does excel display scientific notation

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Peter Mortensen Yes, I see that behavior when my numeric string has more than 15 significant digits. When I click on the cell, the edit box shows the string truncated and padded with zeros as What is odd is that it does the same thing for numbers that don't overflow excel's 15 digit limit. If I paste in , it is displayed as 1. Now, what is odd is if I format this cell to text, it still shows in scientific notation.

That one is a little bit of a display quirk actually - setting the format from general to text wont immediately show it as the original string, but if you go in and edit the data as in, just click into the edit zone and click out it'll update to be exactly what you put in.

If I click on the cell I can see that excel has the entire number, but regardless if I make all the cells text it still wants to use scientific notation. So frustrating! So you've reminisced and reiterated the problem. Now, how do you fix it? Show 1 more comment. Anonymous Anonymous 2, 2 2 gold badges 9 9 silver badges 2 2 bronze badges.

This is so much better than the accepted answer which says "you're kind of out of luck"! I had a CSV file which had this problem, and the custom formatting solution worked perfectly. This still appears to truncate in my test.

Using Excel I entered the following into a cell When I hit enter this is displayed as 1. This doesn't answer the original question. Here I am a year later revisiting the same answer and wishing I could upvote it again. This answer fixes the formatting, but does not preserve the entered data. That is why I cannot accept it as a correct answer.

I posted a short video to show. When you follow these directions, and then enter a long integer like you lose precision when treating it as numeric, even if it is displayed in non-scientific notation.

Excel treats it as the value Only by treating it as text can you maintain all the digits. See youtu. Show 5 more comments. Try this After, copy the column and paste to original column.

Rok Rok 1 1 silver badge 5 5 bronze badges. This works in Excel as well. M Akin M Akin 2 2 silver badges 3 3 bronze badges. That is probably because it is stored as a string. What happens if you make another cell be, say, the cell's content multiplied by 2? I selected all cells, formatted them to Text and then pasted my copied data and it did not show up with the annoying scientific notation.

When I hit enter, the number gets converted to scientific notation. You can see how Excel understood it by looking at the formula bar. There are 15 digits intact but the last 3 digits are converted to zeros. To see how the number is saved, select the cell. You see, the first 15 digits are intact again and the rest 5 digits are transferred to zeros.

So, if you save a number that has more than 15 digits, then remember that the result based on this number will not be as accurate as you may expect. This precision may seem quite limiting, but in practice, it rarely causes any problem.

So, Excel automatically turns a number in scientific notation if the cell width is not sufficient for the number. Simply select the cell where the scientifically noted number sits. And format the cell with Number format. If you format a cell with the Number format from the Number format drop-down, then by default you will get two places after the decimal point.

To avoid the decimal places, you can use the Format Cells dialog box. Select Number option from the left window, and on the right window, make the decimal places to zero. Tags: Excel Math Functions. Welcome to my Excel blog! It took me some time to be a fan of Excel. But now I am a die-hard fan of MS Excel. I learn new ways of doing things with Excel and share them here.

On your page I found what I needed to know. Many Thanks! Is there a way to copy it without making it a screenshot? Is there a way to recover lost leading zeros? Perfect answer. The screenshots made it pretty easy to understand.

Its easy. Problem solved. I agree it is not solved, I have set the column formatting to text for writing in room numbers e. It took me a minute to figure it out. So far this is the best way I could find as I had issues with those trailing zeros that no one was able to address.

Hope this helps! Was looking for an easy way to convert scientific notation to Text format easily. Your page was perfect for what I needed to know and very straight forward.