The boss needs us to enter an employee information form, but Alice's work number is never always not displayed correctly. As long as we enter a number starting with “0”, the spreadsheet always hides the preceding “0” by default, so what should we do?

In this cases, we just need to convert the cell to text formatting.

1. Select a cell, to make a prompt corner mark present.

2. Click the prompt corner mark. Then, the cell will quickly switch to text formatting.

Here is another method to realize it.

1. Right-click the dialog, and click Format Cells.

2. Select Text in the ‘Number’ column, then the selected cell will process numbers in text formatting.

3. When the number starting with a “0” is entered again, it will be displayed normally.

Noted that we usually only use it for numbers calucation, such as serial numbers, ID numbers, and order numbers, since the text formatting may cause errors in the calculation results.

What if you want to convert text contents into numbers?

Select the cell for operation before starting the following steps.

If the number is input as pure text. In this case, A green corner marker and a warning symbol will appear in the upper left corner of the corresponding cell. Then we need to convert the text to a number.

If there is no prompt for the green corner mark, follow these steps. Click Menu-Options, and Error Checking, then check Number stored as text, finally click OK to display the green corner mark normally. This video could be also used in Microsoft Office Excel and Openoffice.