Highlight the cells, CTRL-H, then:

Find What: xx
Replace with: ' (i.e. apostrophe)
Replace All.

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Jan 23, 6:11*am, Woland99 wrote:
I have a column in spreadsheet containing codes - they are 4-digit
numbers
some of them contain leading zeros. So column is formatted as Text to
preserve
those leading zeros. I want to mark some of those codes by adding
extra prefix -
eg. '0041' changes to 'xx0042'. But when I try to remove to remove
that extra string
later by Find/Replace Excel reformats the cell to remove leading
zeros: xx0042
changes to 42. How can I prevent that?

TIA for any pointers,

JT