Here is a quick tip to add awesome to your Wednesday.
If you want to enter numbers like 00023 or 023.340 or 23.34500 in your Excel sheet, you would notice that Excel magically removes leading zeros and trailing zeros (after decimal point) as the number 23 is same as 00023. But sometime, we want 00023, not 23. Then what?!?
Very simple, we use TEXT format instead of number format. Just select the cells where you are going to enter these numbers, and from Home ribbon > Number area, select “Text” as cell type. This tells Excel to treat any value you enter as Text, not as number. So when you type 00023, it will appear as 00023.
See this short demo to understand how to get this work.

Bonus Tip – Use fixed number of zeros
For example, if you want the number to show up in 5 digits (with leading 0s if needed), you can use the cell format code 00000.
To apply this format:
- Just select the cells and press CTRL+1
- From Number tab choose “Custom”
- Enter the format code as
00000 - Done!
Aside, you can see how this formatting works.
That is all for now. Have a great evening then 🙂
More on Cell Formatting
Excel allows you to format cells in myriad ways, some of which may baffle you. But Chandoo.org got your back! We have written several articles to help you master the cell formatting. Read on,
- Formatting Numbers in Excel – an overview
- Custom Cell Formatting in Excel – Tips
- How to show decimal point only for values less than 1
- Show colors in chart labels based on data
- How to hide cell contents in Excel using cell formats
- More on Number Formatting & Cell formatting
PS: We had a minor hiccup with our newsletter. Many of you did not get it for last 7 days. It is fixed now. So you might get one big email from Chandoo.org with all the missed posts.

















11 Responses to “MLB Pitching Stats Dashboard in Excel+VBA by our VBA Class Student”
Hey Dan,
Thanks a lot... this is too good 🙂
Awesome stuff Dan! very impressed..
Thanks guys.
Some nice ideas in there, thanks for sharing. I noticed the list with teams has a missing value though ('Arizona Diamondbacks'). Also when manipulating Pivot Tables with VBA you should be really careful not to try to select a value that isn't in the Pivot Table, if you do all hell breaks loose 🙂 That's not the case here but just some advise as I learned the hard way...
Ah.....ya caught me.
dnrTeamName drives both the charts and the drop down list. It refers to:
=OFFSET(PvtTeams!$A$6,0,0,COUNTA(PvtTeams!$A$6:$A$40),1)
If you change A6 to A5, it fixes that little issue.
A better question though, who actually cares about the Arizona Diamondbacks?
🙂
Excellent post. Thanks
Great job, Dan! Thanks a million!
[...] MLB Pitching Statistics Dashboard [...]
Gr8 work Dan
Hi,
I downloaded file, but looks like everything is in xml. Was there suppose to be excel file as well?
Thanks!
I'm late to the party, but seeing this file in action and studying the underlying data in this Excel file has been AWESOME. I have TONS of new ideas to implement in my work files now. THANK YOU Dan and Chandoo!