Hi Divisha,

Excel automatically does this. The best option is to format the numbers as text by putting an apostrophe in front of them. e.g.

'09 202 555 2121

The apostrophe doesn't display in the cell, you can only see it in the formula bar.

Mynda

Thanks Mynda.

I have tried this before; however, because we are using it to text/sms, it defeats the purpose when we upload to csv file to Vodafone's multi-text with the apostrophe. Needs to be whole numbers. If I use an apostrophe, it will not recognise the number as a cellphone number.

At the moment our work around is to save all the phone numbers with more than 10 characters as an xls document and manually enter them. In effect maintaining two spreadsheets.

After some Googling found this to be a known issue. But would be interesting to know why this happens to csv files.

Hi Divisha,

This is by design in Excel. Excel uses double precision floating-point format which can only hold 15 digits of precision. The solution to this is to format the cell as text, but when you save the file as CSV or Text the formatting is lost.

I wonder, if you entered the area code of the number in a separate cell and the remainder in the next cell, and saved the file as Text would it work?

Mynda

If you format the cells that hold the numbers, as text, you can enter numbers of desired length.  You can then save as/export this as a csv without issue.

see attached files

Phil

I also tried Mynda's suggestion of putting an apostrophe in front of a number, and was able to export this as a csv without issue.  The apostrophes aren't in the csv.  I'm using Excel 2013

Phil