Formatting d
Posted by Ben Adams on July 25, 2001 10:56 AM
Many times I come across a problem where you tell excel to change the format of a cell, but the cell format does not acutally change until you click the curser in the cell and hit enter. Is there a way around this besides coping to another program and pasting it back into excel?
Posted by Mark W. on July 25, 2001 11:38 AM
Ben, this is probably happening because you're
applying a number format to a value that "looks"
like a number, but is data typed and stored as
text. Assuming that the value in question doesn't
have an apostrophe (') prefix, you can use Excel's
Data | Text to Columns... menu command to convert
the text values to numeric. Select your column of
data first. At Step 1 of 3 choose "Fixed width"
and press [ Finish ].
