Why does Excel keep changing the format in my cells?

[Jack_Batty]

@Enginerd

You don’t have to use text for this application - go to “custom format” and enter “0000” in the format box. Excel will give you the four digit number with a leading zero, and you’ll still be able to use that data in mathematical operations.

But you might run into problems if you are using that cell in a lookup formula. Even witht 0000 format, you’d see the leading zero, but the value would still be just 123. =VLOOKUP(“0123”, range, column, FALSE) would return #N/A