I'm writing a VBA "macro" which reads several text files and combines
data from them into a single spreadsheet.

One column must contain a value which is normally expressed in
hexadecimal. The value is represented in one of the input files as a
four-character string in which the characters are all members of the set
"0123456789ABCDEF". Leading zeroes are possible. I need to put that
character string in the cells of one column in the spreadsheet.

Initially, I tried setting NumberFormat property of the cells to "0000".
This worked except for those values which contain a single "E" preceded
and followed by digits. In this case Excel interprets the string as a
number with an exponent and displays the wrong value.

Now I've changed it to set the NumberFormat property to "@". Now all of
the values are displayed correctly but those which contain only digits
(i.e. those which Excel thinks are numbers) are flagged with a little
triangle in the upper left corner and, when clicked, display an warning
message that the cell contains a "number formatted as text."

I can get rid of that by manually selecting "Ignore Error" from the menu
but I haven't found a way to automate that.

Can anyone suggest a way to store (in VBA) a string of hexadecimal
digits in a cell and have the result appear exactly as stored with
leading zeroes if present, non-numeric characters "ABCEDF" if present,
and no warning flag?
--
Norm

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