you employ Excel to track identification numbers (serial numbers,
Microsoft Office Professional 2010, tracking numbers,
Office Pro Plus 2010, and many others.) you may acquire that if the IDs have much more than 15 digits, Excel loses the digits just after the 15th and makes them all zero. In other words, type "123456789123456789" into a cell and Excel will show you "123456789123456000". What's going on? Is this a bug?! Nope. You've hit an Excel limit with how large of a number Excel can handle when performing math operations on a number. in this case, we don't care about performing math on things like tracking numbers. The solution? Don't make it a number at all. Select the cells where you will be entering these identification numbers, right-click, select Format Cells and choose the Text option in the Number tab. This tells Excel to treat the number like normal alphanumeric text,
Office Ultimate 2007, which means they will display exactly as you enetered them, but you can't really use the value represented in the string as inputs to formulas (I'm over simplifying here a bit - those formula savvy among us know there are ways around this,
Microsoft Office 2010 Key, but that's beyond the point of this discussion). a shortcut too,
Microsoft Office 2007 Standard, if you type an apostrophe before entering that long tracking number, that's a signal to Excel to treat the value as Text.