If you are trying to save, update or create a column that lists a person or person’s SSN in Excel without hyphens or dashes, there is a simple way to do it which takes just a few seconds to do depending on your current knowledge of Microsoft Excel. This tip took me about an hour to figure it out for the Human Resources Department but during the troubleshooting, I learned about switching characters in Excel columns so it was not a waste of time.
Hiding/Masking the Hyphens
1. Launch a session of your version of Microsoft Excel.
2. Open your Spreadsheet that needs to be corrected
3. Click the top of the column to be used for SSN to highlight those rows.
4. Right click the top column and then choose the option to Format Cells.
5. Select Special from the Category list.
6. Switch the language to Portuguese (Portugal).
7. Choose Social Security Numbers (Numero da Seguranca Social) from the type.
8. Confirm your changes and review your spreadsheet.
A bonus with this tip is that when entering a person’s Social Security number that starts with a zero, the zero will no longer be stripped from the information so 091123456 will not end up as 91123456.
Note: If you save the Spreadsheet as a (comma delimited) CSV file, the info will be stripped when reopened later in Excel so to see the information without stripping the data, please right click on the Excel file and edit/open it with Microsoft Notepad.
Stephan Pringle
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