The simplest way, if you have control of the third-party software, would be
to export the identifies with a preceding apostrophe, i.e. '4E6, '3B4, etc.
This would not show in the Excel cell (or in a printout) but would force the
item to be text.
best wishes
--
Bernard V Liengme
www.stfx.ca/people/bliengme
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"Barb" wrote in message
...
We import results into Excel 2003 from third party software. One column
is
populated with identifiers such as 3B2, 3C2, 3E4 etc. Any identifiers
that
have an "E" in them convert to Scientific Notation (3.00E +04)
inappropriately. I click on the column and format the number type for the
column to be "General", which then converts the Scientific Notation to a
number (e.g. 30000). We correct the number to 3E4 but it then reverts
back
to Scientific Notation. When we check the format of the cell it has
switched
from General back to Scientific.

How can we avoid this and get the spread sheet to accept the format 3E4 or
4E1 or whatever it should be?