How do I get excel to simply display values without doing math?

Look at the Concatenate Function

https://www.techonthenet.com/oracle/...ons/concat.php

Assuming the values are each in cells, maybe something like this:

=A1&B1&"-"&C1&"."&D1&"-"&E1&"-"&F1&G1

"It came back as ..."

What came back as?

You need to be more specific. Provide some before and after data, otherwise we are working in the dark. I gave a solution based on what you told us.

You can use things like this:

=TEXT(A1,"000")

to force formatting within the string.

The missing information is the starting values - what exactly will be in those cells?

Apologies, what I meant was that excel did convert the data into a string but the data needs to appear as 000-000.000-000-00. I was having some trouble getting it to do that but I've worked it out I think, though excel is giving me copious "Are you sure this is supposed to be text and not a number?" errors. A friend and I were trying to solve the issue and he discovered if you convert the cells to be "text" then I finally get the format I want. I want it to display 101-002.000-000-S5, what excel was giving me was 11-2-0-0-S5. That was the formatting I was trying to correct. We found a solution but I'm curious if there is a better one since now excel recommends every cell be converted back to number which is okay, but ugly. But anyways let me leave off with this example here. I have had to manually ignore the errors for them to stay gone, though that's not a sustainable answer.

Attachment 633699

It sounds to me that you have gone about this the wrong way, but the attachment is invalid, wo I can't look at your spreadsheet to check. If you attach a sample workbook I can advise.

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Here's the way I would have done it (by controlling the formatting via the formula rather than formatting the source cells):

Excel 2016 (Windows) 32 bit

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
4	101-002.000-000-45	1	1	2	0	0	4	5

Sheet: Sheet1

=B4&TEXT(C4,"00")&"-"&TEXT(D4,"000")&"."&TEXT(E4,"000")&"-"&TEXT(F4,"000")&"-"&G4&H4