title: Excel: Convert mass text to a number and maintain fixed length?
body: <p>I'm working with about a 1 million record data set.  Currently the data is formatted as the "text" type and I want it to be a "number" type.</p>
  
  <p>I have used the copy special > multiply technique, but the conversion will drop leading zeros in the data set.  I do not want this, I want to maintain the fixed lengths of the data inclusive of leading zeros.</p>
  
  <p>How do I do this?</p>