Allow 00 when entering phone number

[graiggoriz]

Hello,

I need to enter a simple phone number in a cell such as 00353898798798 (the 00353 is the country code) and when I hit enter I get 353898798798.

That same cell is used by a formula/Macro and I can not change the format cell to text. Would you have any Idea how to keep those 00 or + ?

Many thanks,
Graig

[jeffreybrown]

Hi Graig,

Did you try to use a ' before the number as you enter.

[Pete_UK]

You can enter it with a preceeding apostrophe, like '00353898798798 - the apostrophe will not show in the cell. However, this will change it to a text value, so your formula may need amending if it is performing some arithmetic or if it is using the value in some comparison.

An alternative is to format the cell using a custom format of 00000000000000 (14 zeros) - this will keep the underlying value as a number, but may give strange results to other phone numbers in the same column, like 00000000000123.

I do a lot of analysis with phone numbers and find it better to treat them as text values, so that leading zeros are retained where necessary. Although they look like numbers, you wouldn't really want to carry out any arithmetic on them (like 10% of the number) as that would be meaningless, so they are just labels that happen to be made up only of digits.

Hope this helps.

Pete