I work with card numbers, like credit card and ID numbers. We do not do any calculations with card numbers, obviously. They are "text."

I format them as text, I type them like text. I know how that works. Excel doesn't care. 16 digit card numbers get their last digit turned into a zero, changed into scientific notation, stupid stuff that I did not tell Excel to do.

I need to do things like Find/Remove spaces from cells in files downloaded from our currently imperfect web-system. The system sends me files with 16 digit numbers, cells formatted as text, but due to bugs there are spaces at the end. I do Find/Remove all spaces and all my card numbers are transformed into scientific notation and the last digit turned into a 0. THEY ARE TEXT, they are formatted as text, I yelled into the screen that they are text, why does Excel refuse to acknowledge that they are text? (I would rather find a way to stop Excel's action than find a way to tell our programmers to put an apostrophe in every cell)

How do I make it so that Excel just STOPS doing anything that I didn't tell it to do? Or at least stop it from doing anything to numbers it doesn't like. Maybe I can write a macro for whenever it discovers "Uhoh I should change that number to something different!" I'll make it format that cell to text a thousand times instead.

Give me an error when I try calculating with a number larger than 15 digits, make my computer explode violently, that's fine. Just stop changing the numbers.

Is it possible? I have many thousands of numbers that need changing in many different scenarios. I just want to stop it from trying to help. I can't understand why that would be difficult. I have 2007, but answers for other versions would be great as well.

Thank you!