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: VALUE function
Date and Time in Excel
How are date and time stored and formatted? No matter how date and/or time are formatted and possibly edited, the underlying values saved in cells are still decimal numbers. Given that Excel’s era starts on January 1, 1900, if we enter number 1 in the cell and format it as a date, the date we will see is in fact January 1, 1900.Zero will provide for a nonexistent date of January 0, 1900, and a negative number will result in …
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 …