Removing dashes in a number/leading zero's disappearing

[markin]

I'm telling Excel to do something and it's not obeying my request. I have the following part numbers setup in a column:

000-12345
010-32343
005-16431

I'm wanting to remove the dashes from these part numbers so I use the replace command under edit and for replace I put a - and replace with nothing. For some reason it's deleting the leading zero's so I get:

12345
1032343
516431

If I don't have leading zero's in the part number then this works just fine. I've tried formatting the fields as general and as text and nothing works.

Why is Excel removing the leading zero's and how can I fix this?

Thanks....Mark

 

[NBVC]

Insert a colum and try this formula,

=SUBSTITUTE(A1,"-",""),

Then you can hide the original column.

 

[markin]

I had tried the substitute function using the insert function menu and it wouldn't let me leave the new text field empty. I guess manually typing the function out is the only thing that works.

Thanks for your help....Mark