Hi @textvolt 

You can try changing the format of the data in the column to be text instead of being automatically detected and treated as a number.

Help: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/56470?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop

Alternative is to use Airtable, which has Field types. (string, data, number, etc.)

Hi Troy,

Thanks for the quick reply! As noted above, I have a ‘zipcode’ column that is set to ‘Plain Text’ formatting. 

My understanding is that the formatting of the last row will be ‘copied’ to the next row. However, it seems that the leading zero 0 is forcing the data to be interpreted as a number. Are you able to produce the same result?

Alternative is to use Airtable, which has Field types. (string, data, number, etc.)

This is not a viable option, as we have hours of work already built into Google Sheets.

Hi there @textvolt!

Hope you don’t mind me jumping in here! I just did some testing and was able to recreate the behaviour you mentioned. For cells in a column where the formatting of Plain text had been applied to the previous cell in the same column, the leading zero was indeed removed from the zipcode. 

But, when the entire column was selected and had that formatting applied to the entire column it then retained the leading zero at the start of the zipcode. I suspect that it’s style-related formatting like bold, italic etc. that would copied to the next row, not value-related formatting.

Can you try selecting the entire Zipcode column in Google Sheets to apply the plain text formatting to all the cells in that column, and confirm whether that fixes it?