Preserving leading zeros at cells

[akotronis]

Hello everybody! Here is a situation I am dealing with:

I have a column every cell of which has content ending in = followed by a number that has either four or five digits and some of the numbers have leading zeros. What I would like to do is keep in a column the numbers as they are, preserving the leading zeros, if they exist.

Searching the web I found two suggestions but neither of them work.

1) format the cells of the column to the right as text. After the seperation of the content using text to columns operation, the leading zeros are lost.

2) format the cells of the column to the right as custom typing 00000 at the type. This adds a zero at the numbers with four digits which is sth I want to avoid.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[NBVC]

When you do the TEXT to COLUMNS, after selecting Delimited in first screen, then = delimiter in next screen, click Next, then select the second column in the Preview Pane, then select Text from the column data format section. Now click Finish.