Excel removing trailing zeros

Hi there, I'm having trouble with data being entered into Excel. I have searched for answers on this, but nothing seems to match exactly what I need. At the moment I have a VBA program that reads data from an XML file (which gets spat out of a database program), and inserts this data into an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis. Much of the data comes down in the form of numbers to 1dp, but someone has come to me saying they need to know if someone entered "2" into the database program, or 2.0. When my code enters 2, or 2.0 into Excel, both end up being listed in the formula bar as just 2. Therefore I don't know if the user entered 2 or 2.0. Is there any way that you can alter the behaviour of Excel to stop removing trailing zeros, so that I can see the difference between a user entering 2 or 2.0? Now from what I've found through search, people just say set the cell format to text, but I have a whole load of functions that look to see if what's been entered is a number or not, and if I move over to a text based column I'll need to modify some complex logic tests that I really don't want to tinker with.

As a side note, you might ask why does this matter, as 2 is the same as 2.0, but these numbers are assessment grades and it implies the user isn't grading properly, which needs to be flagged up.

Hope that makes sense, thanks!

Chris

Thanks for all your responses! Interesting discussion. ben_hensel's approach is basically what I am doing. So I bring down the "raw data" into a column, I then work off that raw data to put it into a format that my analysis needs, and this is the so called helper column. It's this function that I'm reluctant to tinker with, because the logic in this helper column is quite complex because it's having to test for lots of different types of input. I think going down the road of having the raw data set as text is the only viable way forward though. In my helper column where I'm testing if it's a number I can just stick VALUE() inside the ISNUMBER() test, and that should solve the problem. I just need to get my hands dirty in the formula.

I can't really do much inside VBA, my code does just work with the data as text and it's only when it gets added into Excel does it lose the ".0". But my problem is that there is an awful lot of data being read from the XML file, and entered into the spreadsheet, so much so that going back and forth from the sheet was having a huge impact on run time. So I now just build up a 2d array of the data I want to add to the sheet (because this is done over many hundreds of columns and hundreds of rows), and then just write that array in one go back to the sheet. By that virtue I don't really want to be working directly with cells, as that would slow the code down, and when the data gets updated I'd have to then find a way to undo the changes that were made, because new/updated data then comes down.

Thanks for your input though!