If you need a column of numbers to display and you don’t want Excel to drop the leading zeros in a number, you will need to create a “Custom” format. In this example we will create a column that will be used for zip codes and we don’t want Excel to drop the zero(s) in the front of the number since all zip codes are 5 digits. We will do this by creating a "Custom" format and not using the zip code format that already exists.