From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

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Excel: Using the single quote

Excel: Using the single quote

From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

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Excel: Using the single quote

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- [Instructor] A zip code is a number, but it's not a value. I mean you're not going to be totalling a column of zip codes in Excel, that would make no sense. So a number, like a zip code or a phone number, is stored as text as you see here in cell B2. The green triangle flags the cell because it's a number stored as text, which is not the typical way values are presented in Excel. The key to entering a number like this is to type the single tick first. So you type tick, or the single quote, and then the value you want to present as text. Press tab or Enter to move to the next cell and you can see that the cell appears left justified but with that green triangle, again, Excel is telling you it's a number stored as text. Now if in this cell I type of value directly, you don't see any green triangle because the number is the way Excel expects it to be. Now by the way, if you want to start a string of text with a single quote…

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