Leading 0 being dropped from phone number export

  • 5 November 2015
  • 4 replies
  • 5 views

Hey everyone, I currently have a form which records phone numbers from AU and NZ, however a lot of these numbers have a leading 0 - eg 02 xxxx xxxx or 036 xxx xxx. When I’m exporting these to google sheets or csv the leading 0 is getting dropped, leaving me with an incomplete number. The same thing seems to be happening with Zapier as well.

Has anyone got a solution to this?


4 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +3

Hi Chun,

This should be fairly easy to fix. The problem comes from how excel handles leading zeros and cell value formatting.

Just select your desired cells/columns, right click > format cells > number (tab)  and pick custom. 

After that enter as many 0 (“zeroes”) as you have digits in your phone numbers. (12 digit phone number = 12 zeroes.)

Hi Hristian,

Thanks for your quick reply - for some reason adding 20 “0”'s to the custom digit fixed it for me in Google Sheet!

Nevermind - it’s now adding extra 0’s onto the front 😦

Userlevel 7
Badge +3

If you are using Google Sheets just select your column > Format > Number > More Formats and put “0”# 

Please note you have to keep the quotation marks around the zero. This would display a single zero in front of your phone numbers.

   

Reply