Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

440 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

Numbers

• There are only 21 characters that Excel considers numbers: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 . , (

) + - / $ % e and E. Anything else is treated as text, which is ineligible for per-

forming most calculations. For example, if Excel sees three point one four in a cell,

it “sees” a bunch of typed words with no numerical value; when it sees 3.14, it

sees a number.

• Depending on the formatting of the cell in which you’re entering numbers, Excel

might try to do some work for you. For example, if you’ve applied currency for-

matting to a cell (see page 486), Excel turns 3/2 into $1.50. But if you’ve format-

ted the same cell as a date, Excel turns 3/2 into a date—March 2 of the current

year.

• If the number you’ve entered is longer than eleven digits (such as

12345678901112), Excel converts it to scientific notation (1.23457E+13).

Text

• Text can be any combination of characters: numbers, letters, or other symbols.

• To make Excel look at a number as if it were a string of text (rather than a num-

ber with which it can do all kinds of mathematical wizardry), you must format

the cell as a text-based cell. Just select the cell and choose Format→Cells. Click

the Number tab and then select Text from the Category list. Click OK.

Dates

• You can perform math on dates, just as though they were numbers. The trick is to

type an equal sign (=) into the cell that will contain ...