How to add country codes/+44 in Excel

Excel tries to help... but sometimes it takes away the + from your country code in your phone numbers. Here's a guide on how to resolve this:

Call your phone number column eg “Phone number country code text format”
Make all your cells in that column into text format (select cells, right click, format cells, text, ok)
Make a new column beside called “Phone number with country code formula”
In top cell of column, enter formula =”+”&C2

C2 is only an example, it should be cell reference number of the first cell in the “Phone number country code text format” column, i.e. the cell next door
it’s basically saying put a plus & whatever is in cell C2
this should result in the phone number with + at the start

Select the cell with this shiny new correct phone number with a + in it, then grab the plus sign in the bottom right and drag it down to the bottom of your column. This should fill out the whole column with the correct numbers.
Finally, create a column beside it called “Phone number” — you want the phone numbers in here, in text format, so you can safely delete the other two columns and not have messy data with extra columns
Copy all the phone number cells from the column called “Phone number with country code formula”
Go to edit > paste special > values > ok. This should result in “Phone number” column containing all the correct numbers. You may get a little pop up warning saying “number stored as text” — that’s fine, you want that because it means you get to keep the + at the start.
You can now safely delete the two original columns “Phone number country code text format” and “Phone number with country code formula”