How can I recover "raw" data from an excel spreadsheet?

Question

I have the following problem:

Part number: 625009E11

Excel rep: 6.25009E+16

I want to recover the original information. Is this possible? Or, does Excel automatically dump the original data if it can format things as a number? (I also have another, similar, problem with leading zeroes.)

Answer 1

You might be able to recover part numbers with some clever scripting, but for leading zeroes you're pretty much screwed. Excel "helpfully" tries to cast strings it recognizes as other data types and does not keep a copy of the original. This has been a known problem for almost a decade, especially in bio research: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80

Don't use Excel as a database, kids.