I have a column of data and it is a 4 character string, with all characters being numbers. The data ranges from 0004 to 8862. My data in the match column is a mix of text (the values with their leading zeros retained) and numbers - which is some of the rest of the numbers. The problem is that I cannot get all of the data in the column to be read as text; for example, 1000-2500 are numbers, but starting at 2502, they are text.

When doing an index/match, Excel treats 2210 the text value different from 2210 the number. How do I get them sync'd up so that my index/match works?