Stopping Excel from rounding off long numbers during import

The Tip of the Night for March 24, 2023, warned about Excel's tendency to cut off numbers with multiple decimal places. Excel will also round up whole numbers with many digits when files are imported into Excel. Here's some additional information on how you can import whole numbers into Excel from .csv files without having Excel round them up and

When importing .csv files into Excel from the Data tab on the ribbon using the From Text/CSV import tool, you will be prompted to detect the data type. By default Excel will base the format on the first 200 rows. In a field with a number with more than 11 digits, Excel will switch the format to scientific notation:

If you except the default settings, load the data, and then reformat the cells to display the whole number, you'll see all of the numbers have been rounded up and will end in zero.

You can avoid this problem when importing the .csv file by resetting the Data Type Detection to 'Do not detect data types'

. . . the file will import into an Excel worksheet with the numbers intact:

Beware of dropped decimal places in Excel

When working with data from .csv files in Excel that includes numbers with multiple decimal places, take special care to make sure none of the decimal places are cut off.

If you have an Excel spreadsheet with differing decimal places in a column of numbers, and the column is not formatted to display all of the decimal numbers:

. . . when the file is saved to a .csv file, the undisplayed decimals will be dropped.

If you have an existing .csv file which has numbers with varying numbers of decimal places, which is opened, edited, and saved in Excel:

. . . some of the decimal places may be dropped when the file is opened in Excel again, and the numbers rounded up:

Searching inside an Excel cell for one of multiple strings

You can use an Excel formula to check to see when any one of multiple values appears in the contents of a cell.

=SUMPRODUCT(--ISNUMBER(SEARCH($D$2:$D$7,A2)))>0

This formula will check inside cell A2 for the values listed in cells D2 to D7.

When you have a range of cells that you want to search through, enter the list of strings you're looking for hits for with an absolute reference using dollar signs. So in this example, we search through the addresses listed in column A for the state capitals listed in column F. We can pull down the formula entered in cell B2 to the cells below using CTRL + D. The formula will return 'TRUE' when one of the values from cells F2 to F51 are listed in column A.