I was doing some data cleansing and data entry I was facing problem
for number in such a way 4 digits: 0001, 0002, … , 1000 etc.
Now I do not want to type “0001” in excel, instead I wanted to type 1 and I want excel to convert that to 0001 for me. So I started looking for a custom cell format and dug a little deeper to understand those. I thought it would be nice to share them to you all.
First take a look at how the cell formatting dialog box – number tab looks like:
I found two things for
Special: Used for phone number, zipcode, social security number formats depending on the locale you select. For eg. for US they would be phone number [xxx-xxx-xxxx], ssn [xxx-xx-xxxx], zipcode[xxxxx, xxxxx-xxxx].
Custom: Used for creating your own cell formatting structure.
Ok, without further confusion, this is probably how you can use the custom cell formatting feature in Microsoft excel.
Some explanation that you can skip if you already get it
- For formatting a number [eg. 1] to fixed number of digits [eg. 0001] you have to use 0000 as the custom formatting code
More interesting If you drag it will automatically fill the sell as follow.