Add leading zeroes/0's to existing Excel values to certain length

excel padding
Mark A picture Mark A · Oct 22, 2010 · Viewed 579.8k times · Source

There are many, many questions and quality answers on SO regarding how to prevent leading zeroes from getting stripped when importing to or exporting from Excel. However, I already have a spreadsheet that has values in it that were truncated as numbers when, in fact, they should have been handled as strings. I need to clean up the data and add the leading zeros back in.

There is a field that should be four characters with lead zeros padding out the string to four characters. However:

"23" should be "0023", 
"245" should be "0245", and
"3829" should remain "3829"

Question: Is there an Excel formula to pad these 0's back onto these values so that they are all four characters?

Note: this is similar to the age old Zip Code problem where New England-area zip codes get their leading zero dropped and you have to add them back in.

Answer

GSerg picture GSerg · Oct 22, 2010 
=TEXT(A1,"0000")

However the TEXT function is able to do other fancy stuff like date formating, aswell.

Related questions

Is there a way to crack the password on an Excel VBA Project?

I've been asked to update some Excel 2003 macros, but the VBA projects are password protected, and it seems there's a lack of documentation... no-one knows the passwords. Is there a way of removing or cracking the password on a VBA …

Read More
IF statement: how to leave cell blank if condition is false ("" does not work)

I would like to write an IF statement, where the cell is left blank if the condition is FALSE. Note that, if the following formula is entered in C1 (for which the condition is false) for example: =IF(A1=1,B1,"") …

Read More
'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0' provider is not registered on the local machine

I'm trying to get data from an Excel file on a button click event. My connection string is: string connString = "Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=C:\\source\\SiteCore65\\Individual-Data.xls;Extended Properties=Excel 8.0;"; When I click on the button, …

Read More