Copy and paste what's visible in the cell. Fractions to text

Hi guys, I'm having a little trouble with formatting on a suppliers stock list

Some of their products SKUs are things such as: 135 1/16

These should be strictly text fields and just reference a product number, we would never want it to be seen as a number. However, excel has them formatted as a fraction

The cell reads 135 1/16 to the human eye which is fine, but excel is treating it as 135.0625

We can't search for the values by searching for 135 1/16 and Changing the format to text changes the value to 135.0625

Is there any way that we can format the cells so that it is treated as purely text and retains the way it looks? Bear in mind we can't get the supplier to change the sheets, we just download from their site

Any help much appreciated,
Dave

Typically, after hours of trying to find an answer and finally resorting to posting on a forum, I immediately find a solution after hitting the post button....

Quick and dirty but it works. For anyone else having this problem, this might work....

- Copy the entire column of SKUs which includes the fractions.
- Paste into notepad
- Change the format of the entire column in excel to text
- Copy and paste values back in from notepad

Thanks Glenn, that didn't work sadly (they were already formatted as fractions). The visible value in the cell showed as 135 1/16 fine, but excel saw that number as 135.0625 so searching for 135 1/16 didn't work