How to add 0 before Numerical values in Microsoft Excel

Add Leading Zeros In Excel

There are quite a few ways to pad your numbers with 0 at the start.

There is an option to change the format of a range to text.

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Doing this will treat any data you enter as text values, even if they are numbers. This will cause Excel to keep any leading zeros in your numbers.

Custom Format

You can add a custom formatting to format numbers with leading zeros.

 

They will only appear to have leading zeros though. The underlying data won’t be changed into text with the added zeros.

 

Add a custom format to show leading zeros.

·         Select the range of cells you want to add leading zeros to and open up the Format Cells dialog box.

·         Right click and choose Format Cells.

·         Go to the Number tab.

·         Select Custom from the category options.

·         Add a new custom format in the Type input. If you want the total number of digits including any leading zeros to be 8 then add 00000000 as the custom format.

Press the OK button.

 

After applying the custom format you will notice the data has not actually been changed.

 

Selecting a cell with formatting will still show the original number in the formula bar. They only appear in the worksheet with the leading zero format.