Why does Smartsheet treat 00 as a text instead of a number?
I ran into this the other day because of mistyping a number. I meant to type in 100 to adjust a number in an other column on the sheet. Instead I typed 00 and instead of adjusting the number from 460 to 560, it appears to have concatenated the 00 and changed the number to 4600. Has anyone ever seen this and is the a fix for this. Screen shot below.
Answers
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If I am ever in doubt, I will wrap anything I know will always be an integer in a VALUE() tag to avoid any unintended surprises later on.
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Anything with a leading zero is treated as a text string. This includes a zero with a leading zero (00).
You could use @Carson Penticuff's suggestion of leveraging the VALUE function, but it still won't assume that "00" is supposed to be "100". Instead of 4600, you would just have 460 which still isn't the 560 you are looking for. The only way to get the 560 is to enter the 100 correctly or write in an IF statement that forces it to recognize "00" as "100" (which won't help if you meant to enter 200 or 300).
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@Paul Newcome
Thanks for answering. I probably wasn't clear in my original post. "00" was an accidental number typed in; "00" was not meant to be a substitute for "100". Instead of Smartsheet treating "00" as a number and leaving the original amount at 460, it added and additional "0" to the original number a made the it 4,600.
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Apologies. I read your post as if you were hoping it could automatically assume "00" meant "100". I am going to chalk that up to not enough caffeine on a Monday. Haha.
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