The purpose of this worksheet is analyzing content of strings of telemetry
displayed as hex characters,in particular parsing and comparing . So I've
set the cell format for each cell to "text". Because otherwise hex string
012e3, will be displayed by Excel as 1.20E+4.

The problem: If
content of cell A1 is DEF987
and
content of cell A2 is =A1
then
A2 displays exactly the three characters, =A1 ... rather than the expected
DEF987. In other words the function in A2 is not resolving, but just
displaying the function. Ditto with other functions, e.g., =MID(A1,1,2); or
=SUM(1,100); or TODAY(). I have Excel 2003 SP3.
thanks.