turn off excel cell modifications?

[Fredrated]

Is there some way to stop excel from deciding I am an idiot that doesn't know
what I want and changes my cell contents?

We are using a third party timecard application, but for some reason when we
download the timecard data as an excel spreadsheet, all of the cells with
numbers in them (project numbers, employee id numbers etc.) have apostrophies
in front of the numeric values. Fine, I don't care, my application just
imports them into a text field and strips out the 1st character.

Problem is, if an employee entered bad data when they used the timecard
application, then we must edit the spreadsheet before it is imported into my
application. This is where excel interfers. If I edit a project number in
the spreadsheet, appearing as '900123, to read '900124, at this point excel
decides this is a number, drops the apostrophy on export, exports 900124
instead of '900124, my app strips the 1st character, and I end up with
project number 124! (leading zeroes lost as well).

Formatting the column as text doesn't help, excel still treats any cell I
edit as a number.

Thanks for any help you can give

Fred

 

[HansM]

A workaround.

Maybe you could replace the apostrophies first with another character? A
find and replace all could do that real quick on a whole column or sheet.
For example, replace the ' with a vertical bar |, make your changes and then
proceed with the stripping the first character (or do a find | and replace
with blank). Recording a couple macros for this will help speed things up
in the future.

Hans