Find/Replace strips out zeros

Hi,
I have an Excel 2010 sheet in which I have a columns of part numbers in the form 003.04.010

I need another column where the period is stripped from this format so that the above part number would become 00304010

The relevant columns have been specified as text but when I try a find/replace to get rid of the period (find /, replace null) the part number gets the leading zeros stripped out and becomes
304010

I have tried all the parameters I can find without any luck. Anybody got any ideas?

Thanks

Mike

EDIT: Problem solved - used OpenOffice to do the find/replacement (which does it correctly - thanks a bunch Microsoft) and saved it back in Excel format.