Cast general numeric cell into text

[Mike Toews <mwtoews sfu ca>]

Hi,

I'm hoping to get some incite as to how I can convert a cell with 
floating point contents (numeric) formatted as "General" to an exact 
displayed text (i.e., string) for that cell. This isn't as easy as it 
should be, since it is dependent on several factors such as cell width 
and font size.

For example: in a fresh sheet put "22.654654378" into one cell, and 
resize the cell back to 64px width. The cell now shows "22.6547". How 
can I capture that into text? If I use (e.g.,) =text(A1,"General") then 
I get the exact value typed originally, and not the displayed value.

Note that I'm actually developing some code to pull this data from old 
spreadsheets into a database, but I don't know how to reverse-engineer 
what MS have done with the general formatting. I'd like to keep the 
original and displayed formatting from this data (i.e, I'd rather have 
the text "0.2986" as displayed rather than "0.29861111111111099", also 
in my situation, the number of decimals change for each row—some use 
numeric formatting that I can use directly, and other cells use 
"General" which require this assistance—very messy). Gnumeric reproduces 
this behavior perfectly, so I'm hoping someone who knows whats ticking 
beneath may be able to help me.

Thanks!

+mt