STOP changing numbers to Scientific!

Options could be
- using power query instead of excel to prepare the data for upload
- using VBA

Would help if you can share a sanitised example sheet, and explain step by step the workflow you go through

We can not make any changes to how the data is sent to us. It comes from other sources.
I also can’t share an example because I can’t duplicate what is happening and I can’t share a copy of the actual sheet.
My question is for those that have experienced this issue and how they resolved when you can not get any edits or changes to save.
I heard this is an issue from awhile ago but by now there should be a fix. And why all of a sudden it’s doing this.
If I could give an example that works, it would be a cell with a number that refuses to change from anything BUT a scientific format.
I have coded and worked with google sheets for years and nothing like this ever happened. If I could get my company to change I would.

I have never scene a scenario where Excel refuses to change number formats (unless someone has placed some severe cell protection on the cell/range). But text files cannot store formatting or protection information, so that seems unlikely. There are two scenarios I am aware of where Excel will display a number as scientific:

1) When the user formats the cell to a scientific number format.
2) When the number is too wide to display in the cell and the cell is formatted as general. In this case, widening the column will usually cause Excel to revert to regular integer view.

I assume (1) is not the case here, which leaves us with scenario 2 -- the column is too narrow. My guess at what is happening is that during the text open/import step, Excel is not autofitting the column width, or something happens when you delete rows that makes this particular column narrow. When Excel exports to a text file, it will export the displayed value (1.4356E9), which will then be read downstream as 1435600000.

My first guess at a solution is to make sure the column is wide enough to display the numbers correctly. My second guess at a solution is to format this column as integer (which, if it is too narrow, might cause Excel to display #####, but I'm not certain if that will cause Excel to export ##### or the number underneath it (if it exports #####, you still end up widening the column).

Not sure that will help, but those are my guesses.

Unfortunately it’s not 1 or 2. It has nothing to do with the size of the column, it’s the cell being set to General and then when edited it changes itself to Scientific because it can’t handle a number with more than 11 digits. Our just started going into 12 digits and this is when this happened. You cannot edit it or do anything to correct the issue.

You cannot edit it or do anything to correct the issue.

If you can't upload a sample file, then I'm not sure how much help we can be at debugging this. I have never seen a case where it is impossible to display up to a 15 digit number using an appropriate number format. If General won't do it, I would expect something like Number -> integer (0 decimal places) would display the full number as a number. Even as scientific, it should be possible to change the number of displayed digits to at least 15 digits (the limit of double precision that Excel uses for displaying numbers).

Could the number be text? What does an ISTEXT() formula return on these cells?

I don’t know how to upload a sample on something that changes when you edit it.
The number is fine with the CSV file gets to us. We open in excel and edit if we have to or it’s been edited before it gets to us then changes the cell by itself. If we do not need to edit it we can upload the file
To our system without