excel how to cancel automatic scientific counting

Mondo Workplace Updated on 2024-02-18

In Excel, when you enter a number more than a certain length, Excel will format it as scientific notation by default. If you want to disable this automatic formatting and prevent numbers from being automatically converted to scientific notation, there are a few ways to do so:

Before entering numbers, you can format the cells to Text. This way, no matter what number you type, Excel will treat it as text and won't automatically convert it to scientific notation.

Select one or more cells into which you want to enter numbers.

Right-click and select "Format Cell".

In the pop-up window, select the "Text" category and click "OK".

If you've already entered a number and Excel automatically converts it to scientific notation, you can cancel this conversion by changing the format of the cell.

Select the cell that contains the scientific notation.

Right-click and select "Format Cell".

Under the "Numbers" tab, select the "General" or "Number" format, and then click "OK".

In some cases, if you want to make sure that the data is displayed in a specific non-scientific notation form while you enter it, you can precede the data with a single quotation mark (')。This tells Excel to treat what is subsequently typed as text.

For example, inputExcel retains the full form of this number without converting it into scientific notation.

When the cell format is set to "text", while it prevents the numbers from being converted to scientific notation, it also means that you can't perform mathematical calculations on those "text" formatted numbers.

If you need to do the calculations on these numbers, make sure you use the Number format and set enough decimal places for the large numbers to display correctly.

With the above methods, you can choose the appropriate way according to your needs to prevent Excel from automatically formatting numbers into scientific notation.

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