Is 1/4 a fraction or a date? It can be either, right? So, how is Excel to know which one you mean when you simply type “1/4″ into a cell? It will make a good effort at guessing, but if it can go either way, then you’ll be faced with a date interpretation rather than a fraction; most likely because dates are used more often in spreadsheets than fractions. By adding a zero to the front of the fraction Excel will know for certain that “0 1/4″ should be a fraction instead of January 4th.
Another annoying fraction fact lies in how Excel formats numbers when you change something like 4.235 to display as a fraction, “4 1/4″ is displayed. If you’re going to use the precision of 3 decimal places, you likely want better accuracy. Click Format | Cells | Number tab and then choose Fraction from the list of number formats. A list of fraction display choices will pop up, allowing you to change from the default of one fraction digit to two or three, turning 4.235 into “4 4/17″ or “4 47/200,” respectively. If your purpose is for inch-based measurements, you can specify that all fractions be in eighths or sixteenths.
This tip ain’t 1/2 bad!
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