The Web Log

The Problem Suppose you have created an HTML page with a table and some data in it, and now you want to work with that data in Excel. Well, the good news is that Excel can open the HTML page and automatically parse the HTML and convert it into an Excel spreadsheet. Your data table will be automatically populated in Excel cells. The bad news is that if you have a cell with only numbers in it, for example, a serial number with leading zeros, like this: 000245689 . Excel will format it as number and remove the leading zeros. You will then have to add back the leading zeros and format it as text to preserve the leading zeros. However, not only it's a hassle having to add back the leading zeros, but it's not always possible to know how many leading zeros were in the original number, if you have 100 numbers with leading zeros all with different lengths. You could check the original HTML 1 by 1 but it's very time consuming. The Solution Well, it turns out...

Most programming languages use comma separated arguments in their functions, like this: someFunction(arg1, arg2, ...) However, depending on your region and number format settings, Excel may choose to use semicolon instead. This is because Excel is trying to interpret comma as decimal separator, and so it decides to use semicolon for argument separator. This can be extremely frustrating for people who are used to programming languages having comma as argument separator in functions. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to change Excel to revert back to using comma as function argument separator. Note this tutorial is tested on Excel 2019 but may work with other versions as well. Excel Options Open the File menu and click on Options . (I hope you know where the File menu button is...) In the Excel Options interface, click on Advanced , then under the Editing options section, you should see 3 settings: Use system separators Decimal separat...