Is there any way to make Excel NEVER automatically delete leading zeros?

Solution 1:

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it's not currently possible based on the answer from a Microsoft employee in this thread.

I've checked and can confirm that there's no option for disabling auto-formatting of numbers in either the current release, Excel 2013 or in the Office 2016 preview. You can disable auto-formatting in some other cases e.g. replacing URLs with hyperlinks.

There's the chance that such an option may be introduced in a future version, but given the annoyance that this 'feature' has caused to users (including me) over many versions I rather doubt it.