>>>Do you know how to instruct Excel to treat text as a text and not as numbers when the text looks like numbers.
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>>I do not understand. Do you want Excel to "treat text as numbers", meaning, like in VFP force Excel to display a message "... type mismatch"?
>>Excel is designed to work with numbers, meaning, to perfom mathematical operations with them. Formatting - it is for user convinience for reviewing data. Thus no matter what is cell fomat, number is "treated" as number in Excel.
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>I want Excel to treat text data as text even if the text may look like numbers.
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>E.g. if I have character field that always contains digits only starting with valid digit I want Excel to recognize them as text and not as numbers.

Still not inderstandable. If it is regarding the paerticular job you are doing, then give me an example to reproduce the behavior, and tell EXACTLY what you need.
If it is an imaginary problem (and I suppose it is), then I would recommend you work on it gaining your own experience instead of collecting ideas from others.