31st July 2001

Is 1/4 a fraction or a date? It can be either, right? So, how is Excel to know which one you mean when you simply type "1/4" into a cell? It'll make a good faith effort at guessing, but if it can go either way, then you'll be faced with a date interpretation rather than a fraction... most likely because dates are used more often in spreadsheets than are fractions. By adding a zero to the front of the fraction, Excel will know for certain that "0 1/4" should be a fraction instead of January 4th. Another annoying fraction fact lies in how Excel formats a number when you change the format of something like 4.235 to display as a fraction, "4 1/4" is displayed. If you're going to use a precision of 3 decimal places, you likely want better accuracy than that. Click Format | Cells | Number tab and then choose Fraction from the list of number formats. Up will pop a list of fraction display choices, allowing you to change from the default of one fraction digit to two or three, turning 4.235 into "4 4/17" or "4 47/200," respectively. If your purpose is for inch-based measurements, then you might want to specify that all fractions should be in eighths or sixteenths. This tip isn't 1/2 bad.