15 digit limit in Excel

This is something everyone should know about Excel since it both enables Excel to do lightning speed calculations and limits Excel in a great way. And the guilty party is IEEE 754.

What is IEEE 754 and why does it give you a heart attack in Excel

Whenever you work with large files in Excel, so many worksheets with countless formulas, you have probably wondered, how does Excel do it so fast… Well if it wasn’t for IEEE 754, it would take an eternity. But this cutting of corners or rather of numbers also has a downside…

“Microsoft Excel was designed around the IEEE 754 specification with respect to storing and calculating floating-point numbers. IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, an international body that, among other things, determines standards for computer software and hardware. The 754 specification is a very widely adopted specification that describes how floating-point numbers should be stored in a binary computer. It is popular because it allows floating-point numbers to be stored in a reasonable amount of space and calculations to occur relatively quickly. The 754 standard is used in the floating-point units and numeric data processors of nearly all of today's PC-based microprocessors that implement floating-point math, including the Intel, Motorola, Sun, and MIPS processors.” (Direct quote from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/78113)

You will notice this standard in many ways in Excel, but the main is, that if you write an integer with more than 15 digits (which is quite feasible), excel will transform all integers starting with the 16^th to zero. So when you put 1234567890123456789 in a cell, you get 1234567890123450000. The same goes for 1234567890.123456789 that would give 1234567890.123450000! This is by itself quite a drawback, but it doesn’t end there, this limitation impacts all parts of Excel, including calculations. Below is a very simple calculation…
Adding the three numbers in A1, A2 and A3 should result in 0, but you get something else entirely different. This is due to another limitation that is a side effect of the IEEE 754 or more precisely a side effect of something that excel did not adopt from IEEE 754 and that is the “negative zero”. So when excel should give something like -0.x as a side result or as the end result, you are in trouble. With this in mind it can be said, that Excel doesn’t really calculate "correctly" (according to people's expectations of what the results should be, if you know about the way calculations are done in Excel, then you know that Excel calculates exactly as it should, but for 95% of people who don’t know this, the calculation is simply incorrect), and if we would like to continue our journey to eternal happiness in Excel, this is good to know!

Is there a way around this

The short answer is NO since Excel works as it was built to work. The long answer is, you can store longer number as text (so begin writing in Excel with an apostrophe), and you will see more than 15 integers, but if you will want to convert them back to numbers and do calculations with them, you will again only work with 15 integers!

Quite a few answers were also given here in the comments section. A few VBA functions are presented that solve the problem and give you an ability to work in Excel without having to keep an eye out.

Now whereas Excel cannot do this, you can get around this by using an Add-In. There are many out there, here is an example: xlPrecision