Hello,

I had to remove your example as the formatting didn't quite translate legibly into the context of your community post.

Currently, Smartsheet automatically treats values as text or numbers based on the characters in them. You can convert a number into text by adding an apostrophe to the beginning of it. You can either do this manually or by concatenating from other cell values with a formula. For example:

="'" + [Issue ID]1

There currently isn't a TEXT() or similar function to force the conversion of something into text.

More on building formulas can be found in the help center: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2476606-formulas-reference-data-from-other-sheets

You can simulate Excel's TEXT function using a combination of LEFT(), a static string, and the LEN() of the data you want to work with.

Say you have a column "Serial" which contains integers ranging from 1 to 999999. To left pad with zeroes use something like this:

= LEFT( "000000", 6 - LEN( [Serial]@row ) ) + [Serial]@row

so a value of 3231 would look like 003231. The 6 in the formula is the length of the static string "000000"

If you wanted to right pad you would use something like:

= [Serial]@row + RIGHT( "000000", 6 - LEN( [Serial]@row ) )

A value of 3231 would look like 323100 in this case

THANK YOU you just helped me solve a broken "countifs" formula that was returning zeros. I created a helper column using your formula to recreate the values I am counting as "text", and now the countif works properly.