VB Forum / General 2 / March 2004

Two points about your post. First, you don't need all the number-symbols (#)
in the format statement to force the thousands separator to be printed
throughout the answer. This would have sufficed

    Print Format$(a# * b#, "#,###")

Second, why not eliminate the E-notation and give an answer that is accurate
to 25 places (maximum of 29 places if there is no decimal point)?

    Print Format$(CDec(a#) * b#, "#,###")

That will print out this value...

    24,494,897,427,831,905,014,545,091

Rick - MVP

The number after the "E" is not the number of 0's in the number; rather, it
is the number of decimal places to move the decimal point. Depending on the
number, it may take you past the end of the last digit or not. For example,

    A = 1.23456789E5

will have no 0's when expanded (the value is 123456.789). If you want to do
it as Strings along the lines of what you suggested, then your code would
look something like this

Number = 1.23456789E25
NumAsString = CStr(Number)
Power = Mid$(NumAsString, InStr(NumAsString, "E") + 1)
Adjusted = Left$(NumAsString, InStr(NumAsString, "E") - 1)
Answer = Left$(Replace$(Adjusted, ".", "") & _
                         String$(Power, "0"), Power + 1)

However, this code wouldn't work if the power wasn't large enough to produce
zeroes at the end (as in the initial example above). If your numbers are
coming from calculations and if the number following the "E" (in the number
resulting from the calculation) is not greater than 28, it is possible to
get all of the digits (depending on "significant digits" considerations)
using the Decimal data type. For example,

    A =123456789012345
    B = 98765432109
    Product = A * B

If you now printed Product out, this is what you get

    1.21932631135939E+25

However, if you did this for the Product calculation

    Product = CDec(A) * B

and printed it out, this is what you get

    12193263113593897260385605

Rick - MVP

then