You will sometimes encounter issues while trying to MATCH or LOOKUP data in Excel if your numbers are formatted as numbers in one of your tables and as text in another table. While special formats are available in Excel, they are relatively rarely used and are limited. Some “numbers”, such as identification numbers, are more often stored as text. This is done in order to add leading zeros, hyphens, and other characters to those numbers. However, if we try to …
Tag: RIGHT function
Numbers in Excel
How are numbers stored, formatted and calculated? When dealing with numbers in Excel, we should be aware of a few things: numbers in Excel can be formatted in many ways: plain numbers, currency, percentage, date, etc. no matter how they are formatted and possibly edited, underlying values saved in cells are still decimal numbers those decimal numbers that Excel uses and calculates with go up to 15 decimal places (and even with that, there are caveats) this is not changed even …
Text in Excel
Text-related features Excel may have a reputation for crunching numbers, but text-formatted data such as names, addresses, and descriptions is often encountered. Excel is also often used for processing data from a wide variety of unrelated databases, applications, and web sites. With those, issues such as numbers formatted as text, text formatted as numbers, multiple text fields combined into a single cell, and broken tables are not uncommon. Further complicating things, Excel functions designed to manipulate text-formatted data are many, …