laura_in_abq wrote...
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. *. . .

This is EXACTLY how the Text number format is intended to work, AS
STATED IN ONLINE HELP. So Excel is functioning in this respect EXACTLY
as it should.

If A1 were hex, then leave A2's number format General or 0 or any
other sensible number format. The formula =A1 in cell A2 would then
evaluate as DEF987 as text, and if A1 contained the text 12E4, this
formula in A2 would evaluate to 12E4 as text. Excel only tokens like
12E4 to 12*10^4 when you enter 12E4 as a constant or when you use
"1eE4" as an arithmetic operand. You only need to format the cells
containing telemetry data with number format Text.