Three cells in a spreadsheet are deliberately changing their values (rounding off, essentially). For e.g., a cell which is supposed to read 9969001500006276 gets converted to 9969001500006270, later when I reopen excel, I find the number as 9969001500006280.
I have tried increasing decimal spaces and changing number formats and enlarging cell size.
I have even tried to remove the column altogether and recreate it.
I have also tried editing in Google Sheets and SoftMaker FreeOffice and (guess what) I got the same results.
The problem is repetitive only with the three cells and other cells seem to function well enough. (I am a complete amateur with spreadsheets. And, I use Office 2016.)
52 Answers
Answer:
Bank account numbers are just an "identification", not something you would use in a mathematical formula. Enter these with a leading ' and Excel WILL NOT change them anytime. (This is equal to an UNCONDITIONAL "TEXT" formatting)
Background information:
As @Scott Craner says, for numbers there is a 16 digit precision limitation - due to the way that NUMBERS are used in a computer (i.e. 64 bit floating point format, also known as "double precision").
To get past that limit one must use special tricks and utilities - IF IT IS INDEED a NUMBER, to be used for e.g. calculations.
The linux command line calcuator bc is one such utility, and e.g. Python has several ways to handle high precision numbers.
Ref:
"Between 2^52=4,503,599,627,370,496 and 2^53=9,007,199,254,740,992 the representable numbers are exactly the integers. For the next range, from 2^53 to 2^54, everything is multiplied by 2, so the representable numbers are the even ones, etc. Conversely, for the previous range from 25^1 to 2^52, the spacing is 0.5, etc. "
In depth explanation:
this behavior is to be expected. It is due to the way numbers like that gets stored inside SpreadSheets. Every cell is container of some data and metadata. Like when you store a date, sometimes you will see it as a number such 43475 when there is no format applied, then you will go and ask for a short date format and it will be displayed as 10/01/2019. So compromised had to be made in order to fit said data and metadata, for those cells in every spreadsheet.
Then about the number I have addressed this in This Answer Numbers are stored in float point number variables, which you can read more about here, are like a division and scientific notation. It will generate the string of numbers and then it will place the decimal in place. So the last couple of numbers are not that precise, because of rounding up the last digits.
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