How to prevent Excel rounding numbers or adding redundant 0's?

Posted by Highly Irregular on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Highly Irregular
Published on 2012-02-07T21:00:44Z Indexed on 2012/11/16 11:05 UTC
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microsoft-excel

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text-formatting

I have a column of numbers that appear like this:

enter image description here

but the actual value of the shown cell is 20130.153334

Other values have a different number of decimal places. I don't want to add redundant 0's, so I can't just specify a particular number of decimal places to display. I really just want to treat the values as text.

I have already changed the format of the cell to Text, as the description for Text is: "Text format cells are treated as text even when a number is in the cell. The cell is displayed exactly as entered.". However, it clearly isn't being displayed exactly as entered! Strangely, if I hit F2 on the cell to go into edit mode, then hit enter, it is then displayed correctly. I can't do this manually for 2000+ records though!

How can I prevent the numbers being rounded?

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