Excel – Scientific notation in Excel

If you wish Excel to keep the cell formatted exactly as entered, i.e. 8230e12, regardless of whether you are looking at it or editing it, then this can't be done whilst retaining the ability to treat the cell contents as a number.

The only way I can see round this is to enter your data in cells that are formatted as text, and then have another cell, formatted as some kind of number, that has a formula of =VALUE(A1) or whatever so that calculations can be performed on this cell.

Other than that you are looking at some VBA to manage this, overkill I would have thought.

Ah, memories of data munging back from when I did some massive number cross checking in Excel (never again).. When you punch in long numeric strings into Excel, try say, 12345678901234567890 (20 digits), Excel will generally convert it for you, meaning that the 20 digit number you've just tapped in has been cut back to be only about fifteen significant figures.

Note as well: the conversion is a truncation, as opposed to rounding. (12345678901234567890 is 1.23456789012346E+19, but excel will show you 1.23456789012345E+19)

This occurs at point of entry, so once it's in, any additional detail is lost, and so even if you tell Excel that you really meant that was text, and not a number, you're kind of out of luck, and hence why your first sequence doesn't work.