Number Formatting Pt. 1: Phone #'s, Zip Codes and SSN

You have the wonderful task of entering in hundreds of phone numbers into a spreadsheet. Your boss wants all of the phone numbers to be in this format: (617) 555-5555. Before you came to this blog, this would have been a very, very tedious job. Now you will learn how to quickly format phone numbers, zip codes, and social security numbers in a few quick, easy steps.

First, enter you list of numbers without any formatting as show below (notice how by default zip codes that start with a zero only show 4 numbers. Our formatting will fix that!):

Select the numbers you want to format and press Ctrl + 1. Alternatively, you could to to the Home tab, under the Number section click on the drop down menu to change the number format and click on More Number Formats down at the bottom.

You will notice under Category there is a Special option. Click on that and this menu will now appear.

From here, click on the format you want and click OK. And that is it! No more tedious work for you! Now on to the more important duties of your job.

Join us next week where we will continue to explore more number formatting options!