James asks in Custom Cell Formatting in Excel Post,
I have a problem when formatting a cell that has 16 or more digits … We are working with Credit Card numbers and want to be able to enter them as a 16 digit number like this: 1234123412341234 but want them to look like this: 1234 1234 1234 1234
The problem we’re having is that the last digit always turns into a 0 (zero) and the number ends up looking like this: 1234 1234 1234 1230 The custom format type we created is: 0000 0000 0000 0000 but we’ve also tried: #### #### #### #### with the same results.
This only happens when using 16 or more digits. If we use 15 or less digits, the Custom format works fine. Unfortunately, credit cards have 16 digits so we’re stuck with the problem.
We’ve tried this on Excel 2007 with service pack 1 and on Excel 2000 with service pack 3 with the same results. The Operating Systems we’ve tried it on are Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (and all other Microsoft Updates installed) and on Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4.
Well, this is because Excel stores numbers with precision of 15 digits. So anything more and it is automatically converted in to engineering format.
Here is a simple workaround if you need to store and work with credit card numbers in excel:
Change the cell format to TEXT from general or number. Thus excel treats numbers as text and you can escape the truncation.
But what if you need to format the credit card numbers in a special way? well, we use a knife and cut the number in to 4 small parts. Not really, we use the LEFT, MID and RIGHT formulas to process the credit card number and format it the way we want.
For eg. if you want to format the credit card number 1234123412341234 like 1234 1234 1234 1234, you can use the formula
=LEFT(B3,4)&" "&MID(B3,5,4)&" "&MID(B3,9,4)&" "&RIGHT(B3,4)
and if you want to test the credit card, you know where to go. To our Excel formula E-book page.
17 Responses to “Custom Number Formats – Colors”
You are right, Chandoo. I was playing with the colour numbers last week and some of them don't appear different from each other. Others are totally different from yours.
@Duncan
Each version of Excel, post 2003, renders colors slightly differently
Different language versions may also have different default color palettes
Hello in french
excel 2010
colo1 = couleur1 = black
[couleur1]; [couleur2]; etc..
@Hui, thank you very much again for this great post.
However - under Excel 2007, Hungarian version your solution does not work with color names. I've tried both English and Hungarian names, but drops an error message "not valid formats"
Do you have any idea how to solve this issue?
thanks in advance
@Andras
Without a Hungarian version of Excel 2003 I don't think I can assist
Have you tried using the colour numbers? I couldn't get the names to work (despite using an english version of excel). but it did work with the numbers though. I left out the "u" and was easily able to produce burgundy using [color9]
Here a possible solution: find an English version of Excel, write there the formats using English names, then open the file in the Hungarian version and see the translation.
In Excel 2007 I can't get the colour names to work e.g Sea Green but the numbers do e.g color3 - colour3 does not work so I must bow to the country that has stolen my language (ha ha!)
Hey chandoo, nice Tip!
Wouldn't be easier just apply some conditional formatting for negative numbers and another for positive numbers? Or there's some cases that you can't do that?
Unfortunately the TEXT function doesn't color the cell as number formatting does.
Hi Hui,
Great post Sir, love the new way of formatting with color numbers.
I am using 2007, and it leads me to the last color number 56.
Thanks Hui.
[…] explains how to set up custom number formats with a wide array of […]
Thanks Hui - works a treat!
Thank you, very helpful.
Trying to figure out if it is possible to apply color only to a part of the cell?
E.g. I have a value formatted as Accounting with a currency symbol.
Those I find somewhat distracting though necessary. If I could make them less obtrusive by coloring them gray while the number would stay black, that would be great. Tried tinkering with the format string, but didn't get the desired result. Single color for complete cell value works, but coloring just part of it could not be achieved. Maybe somebody managed that?
Exactly what I was looking for - thank you!
colour in the Australian doesn't work - we have to go American and no problem.
I always thought is was 56 colours notice you have 57. Cool.
thanks
Analir Pisani
Customised Microsoft Office Training Specialist
Sydney - Australia
http://www.azsolutions.com.au
Thank You!