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hi i'm steve friedman with rockstar excel and today i'm going to show you how to fix zip codes when excel strips out the leading zeros now the problem is u.s zip code should have five digits and sometimes they start with a zero but when excel sees the number it assumes that a number should not start with zero and will remove it so if you were to go here and type say zero whatever and then any four numbers excel will just change it and remove the zero now one way to fix that is if you start it with an apostrophe and then uh type start it with a zero that will make excel see it is text and it will keep the zero but if you have a spreadsheet with say 10 000 or so rows it's not really practical to do that one at a time so there's a better solution and that is you use a formula that takes all of 10 seconds to do which is just equals text a2 or the cell that you want to change uh and then quote zero zero zero zero quote close parentheses uh and then that uh turns it into a five digit number and we'll add leading zeros to make it a five digit number and then all you have to do is just double click over in the little square here and it fills it down so once again to prove that that is really a 10 second process i'll do it again without me taking the time to explain it and you can time it yourself so that is how to fix zip codes then put the leading zeros back into them in 10 seconds i'm steve frieden with rockstar excel be sure to like and subscribe and check out our webpage of rockstarexcel.com for uh our blog with more excel tips uh and uh courses in consulting are classes you can also book a free discovery session or submit uh questions about excel to have them answered for free so once again i'm steve friedman for rockstar excel and that was how to fix uh leading zeros and zip codes in 10 seconds