Technicalities: Zip Tip!

We’ve been working a lot here with other people’s mailing data and it always irks me that Excel, which is the go-to app for large data tables, insists on stripping leading zeros out of zip codes. The reason, of course, is that Excel sees columns of numbers as, well, numbers. And real numbers don’t have arbitrary zeros in front of them. So I’ve been dutifully fixing such columns with a formula.

Well, to make a humiliating story short, as probably everybody else in the universe who’s ever worked in Excel knows, you just have to define the column as Format Cells > Special > Zip Code. Abracabra! Properly formatted zip codes.

What I like about my job is learning something new every day. Even when it’s stone obvious!