If the Excel cell format is not changing to a number because the Number formatting is not working, take these steps to fix the issue.

1] Format cells as text The first thing you can do to prevent Excel from automatically changing a number to date is to change the format of problematic cells to text.

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Microsoft Excel depends on data that’s stored correctly. If you receive text values that should be real numbers, use one of these methods to get you back to the real work.

Numbers (and Excel) reads this as straight text. After importing, you can select the column and explicitly set it to text via the Format Inspector > Cell > Data Format, where you choose Text.

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