Formatting Numbers in Microsoft Excel

"Hi, I’m Gary for Expert Village, here’s an important tip when dealing with numbers on our spreadsheet. We find that Excel either treats a number as a numerical, numerical digits used for calculations or it treats it as text. The difference is, is like a number which I find, come across often, I do a lot of mailing and when I set into the state of New Jersey, New Jersey has zip codes that are preceded by zero so when you type it in, if you were typing in a list of names and addresses and you were using the zip code, a New Jersey zip code, what will happen is, you’ll enter the five digit zip codes starting with zero but as soon as you click off of it, the Excel, the program will read this as a, a digit for calculation, and obviously in a calculation you don’t need the zero in front of a number because it has, it’s value is zero. It’s not going to do or change anything if it’s added or subtracted or multiplied so what if we want to keep that zero there because we’re not using it for a calculation but we’re actually using that, that number for a, to be treated as text, like a zip code in a mailing address. So what we would do, is we would go to the cell where we want to enter the information and we would click up here on our formula bar and we would precede the number by the apostrophe. We would put an apostrophe and now put in the number, the same exact number and now Excel knows to treat that number as a text entry and not as a numerical entry. So being as it’s text, it’s going to print it exactly as it was typed in, exactly as the full five digits and now we can go ahead and use this for, for zip code or any text information with accurate numbers. Now if we have a whole column of numbers and we want the whole column to change, let’s say that we want this whole column to be zip codes we can click on the column, go up to format and click on cells and we can actually choose that, that number should be read as a zip code. So we would go over here and click on special and here we have the option to click on zip code and now we know that, that whole column is zip codes so that will be treated as zip codes and we see our zero appeared again in the number because Excel now knows that it is not a calculation."