Forum Discussion
Shilgirl
Sep 25, 2021Copper Contributor
Length of a number in an excel cell
I can't seem to type in some tracking numbers correctly. The number is correct for only so many characters and then it all changes to 0's so the number is never correct. It seems to be cutting off ...
PeterBartholomew1
Sep 25, 2021Silver Contributor
What you call a 'number' is not numeric data at all (no one is going to ask you to divide it by 2 or extract a square root); it is merely a string of digits and should be treated as text. There may well be information encrypted into the strings but the operations that make sense would be of the form
= MID(trackingNumber, startLocation, stringLength)
= MID(trackingNumber, startLocation, stringLength)
Shilgirl
Sep 25, 2021Copper Contributor
That makes sense to me Peter. Frustrating but your comment is helpful. Thank you.