Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Showing Text Only by Hiding Numbers

Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Showing Text Only by Hiding Numbers

You can custom format a cell to show or hide only positive numbers, negative numbers, zeros, or text. Here, a range of cells is formatted to show only text with the custom format ;; (that is, with two semicolon characters) as seen in the following pictures.

Note that in column D, dates are hidden because Excel regards dates as numbers.



• Select the range of interest.
• Right-click that selection.
• Click to select Format Cells from the popup menu.


• In the Format Cells dialog box, select the Number tab.
• Select Custom from the Category list.
• Enter the custom format ;; into the Type field.
• Click OK.