> Well, despite plentiful advice on StackOverflow and elsewhere, I’ve found only one (undocumented) thing that works with any sort of reliability: For any cell that begins with one of the formula triggering characters =, -, +, or @, you should directly prefix it with a tab character.<p>>Unfortunately that’s not the end of the story. The character might not show up, but it is still there. A quick string length check with =LEN(D4) will confirm that.<p>The documented way is prefixing with a ' character. It doesn't have the length issue either.<p>As to the root issue, I can't think of any perfect way to transfer a series of values between applications that apply different types to those values and applications that don't. At some point, something is going to have to guess.