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I am to store an international standard phone numbers (starting with a plus sign followed, usually, by plain numbers) in a Google spreadsheet column. An example of such a phone is

+420123456789

When I enter this phone it turns to just 420123456789 to be seen in the cell and =420123456789 to be seen in the formula/value bar. I would like to disable this conversion.

I've tried using Format - Numbers - Plain text applying it to the whole column as well as to the particular cell but it doesn't seem to work.

Any ideas how to overcome this?

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

If you prefix the data in the cell with a single quote ' it should prevent any default formatting

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I knew that, that works in Excel and OpenOffice too, but using it all over doesn't look too pretty :-] – Ivan Oct 15 '12 at 11:54
Moreover, if I do that in GoogleDocs, it adds a second ' and a ' is actually displayed in the document. – Ivan Oct 15 '12 at 11:56
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The single quote only shows if you formatted the cell as plain text. If you leave it in the default number format, the single quote prefix will disappear. I just tested and confirmed in one of my own Google spreadsheets. – efgen Oct 15 '12 at 14:52
As @efgen says. Just to add... the single quote still appears in the formula bar, but it is not considered part of the data. (Curious, at no time for me does it add a second '?) – w3d Oct 16 '12 at 12:32
up vote 1 down vote

Using ' does not work if formatting is set to Numbers → Plain Text. Use "Clear Formatting" instead.

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