One must be entered as '1002 which makes it text
the other as 1002 which makes it a number hence not the same...

This will pass the tests you perfomed.

If you click on the green arrow it will tell you that 'Number stored as text'

"dhstein" wrote:

I have 2 cells B1 and C1. They both show a value of 1002. They are both
formatted as text fields. The LEN function returns 4 for each cell. I do a
=CODE(LEFT(B1,1)) and get a value of 49. The same for cell C1. I check the
Middle 2 chars and the last character and they match exactly. BUT the
=IF(B1=C1,1,2) returns a 2 - the cells don't match. B1 shows a green
triangle in the upper left so I think it's related to the format but I'm
stumped. Thanks for any help you can provide.