Keep your Excel Cells Formatted as a Number (Even when you add text!)

hi I'm Jamie and welcome to teachers  Tech you know how if you add text to   a cell and then try to apply a formula  to it won't work I want to show you   a way around this where you can add  text and still have your formula work so I have a formula simple formula here  here's my total of everybody here uh 2. 6 million   of all of these and then I have nine episodes  and I just divided it get so much per episode   but if I was going to go to here and go in  this cell and if I started typing episodes   uh in here so that's spelled incorrectly so  if I just type episodes click off it doesn't   recognize it because it becomes text you can  see how it's aligning uh there's having some   issue in here but you can actually add text here  so if I look at this you can see what's typed up   here but I'm going to go and actually format  it so I can have words in it so if I go back   to this number nine here and I'm going to use  control one the shortcut go to custom and this   time so it's just going to be I'm going to use  the zero but I can actually add my own custom   uh text formatting here and so what I'm going to  do is add a quotation mark here I'm going to add   a space and I'm going to type episodes like this  and then I'm going to end my quotation marks so   if I hit okay now it says Nine episodes and it  didn't wreck the formula so if I look up in the   formula bar up top it still says nine so I'll do  do that one more time if I click on this one where   the amount is this is already formatted with the  dollar sign I'm going to go control one and I'm   going to go to custom and maybe I just want the  word total so I can see there if I go up uh and   just pick a simple one here you can go up and see  all the different ones that you can pick but if I   was just picking this and I'm going to pick total  I can use my quotation mark and I write total and   I'm going to give a space an end quotation mark  and now I have total the $2. 6 million and nothing   uh if I look up at the sum it's still there the  the text isn't there it's being recognized as a   number so that's a way that you can add text to a  cell that doesn't get recognized as a number and   with any of these cells that you just format it  just go back I'm going to use control one again   check out the custom and notice that it's in  here so this is a format that's created and if   you didn't want it you could delete it and you  can see how it goes back to normal like that   I hope you enjoyed this tip about how to format  your cells to use text and it works in a formula   still if you want to learn about how to combine  different columns all together into one cell   and even add text take a look at this video  you'll be surprised how simple it is to do