Format number string length

  1. What is your feature/integration request?Enhance the format number feature so that a number length can be set.
  2. What problem would this feature/integration solve? Sometimes leading 0’s are omitted when ran through Google sheets. If the length could be set to 12, it would resolve the issue by adding a leading 0 to 11 digits numbers.
  3. How do you solve/workaround this problem today? Even though I set the length to 12 in Google sheets, appended data doesn’t pick up the formatting. It then omits the leading 0’s in some of the data but not all. My workaround doesn’t handle both scenarios well, it’s one or the other. If I could split a column with a null delimiter, mayeb I coudl count columns and determine whether a leading 0 is necessary.

Hey Thomas! I believe Google, when you ask it to show N digits, fills in 0’s as a visual update, and does not actually store them.

Can you try putting a non-numerical character before your numbers? I know that is historically a way that folks keep leading zero’s in spreadsheets that are a little over-eager to remove them. Something like '00072846 instead of 00072846 is how I have seen it in the past.

If you need to work with that value in Parabola as a number, you can remove that character with a Find Replace.