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I'm pretty sure that modifying a cell's number format never affects the underlying value.

maybe not the actual memory data, but AFAIK it does affect the behavior of other logical / arithmetic functions in strange ways

Okay, thanks. If this is correct... it's unsettling and not cool.

there are excel parsing libraries will treat the underlying data differently depending on how it is formatted.

operations people basically have to do workarounds for this all the time.