preserving trailing zeroes when pasting to Excel

[mellenburg]

I have a table in word that I'm pasting into excel. One of the columns in the table contains ICD9 codes which look like decimal numbers, but aren't. For example, the code 428.1 is not the same as 428.10. When I paste to Excel, the trailing zeroes are getting dropped. Is there a way I can prevent this and force Excel to interpret the values as text?

I have tried using various paste specials and formatting the column in excel as text. Any other suggestions? Thank you,

Matt

 

[mellenburg]

I was wrong, I hadn't tried what I thought. If you format the cells to text, and then paste the contents as text, it will preserve the trailing zeros.