Friday, July 8, 2011

How To Force Excel to Show Leading Zero in UPC

When Microsoft Excel opens a .csv file it assumes it knows what type of data is in every column. If there are numbers it must be a number. If there is some text, it must be a text column. If Excel decides a column is a number it will drop all the zero's at the beginning assuming they don't matter. This makes UPC data incorrect.

Excel No Leading Zero
There is an easy way to force Excel to keep the leading zero on UPC data though:

1. Download The Price Guide

Download the price guide and save it to your computer. (If you're not a subscriber you can start a free account)

2. Change the Guide to a Text File

Go to the folder where you saved the price guide. Right click the file and choose Open With > Notepad.

Open File in Notepad

In Notepad, go to File > Save As. Save the file a .TXT file type.

Save As

Open The .TXT File in Excel

Open Excel and open the file "today.txt" that you just created. This will open a series of three questions.

Question 1: Select "Delimited" and then click "Next"
Excel Text Import Wizard

Question 2: Select "Comma" and click "Next"
Excel Text Import Wizard 2

Question 3: Find the UPC column and change it to "Text" instead of "General". Click "Finish"
Excel Text Import Wizard3

Spreadsheet Showing Leading Zero in UPC

Excel will now show the price guide with the leading zero still intact so all UPC data will be the complete 12 characters.
Excel Showing Leading Zero

This article is a part of a series of posts with how to articles for our price guide subscribers.

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