change cell from num/percent to text

[deft1]

I am trying to create a app that at some point is going to have to read the character information inside a cell a character at a time. This is so i can keep all of the formatting data. bold/italic/etc.. iv come across the problem that if the cell is a number or percentage then the whole cell.characters(start,length).whatever thing will not work. how would i go about converting the cells to text format but keeping them looking the same. inorder that i can harvest their formatting character by character. Thanks in advance if anyone can help me. using vb6 btw so a vba fix is likely close enough to understand

 

[deft1]

ok realised that is stupid, if they are stored as percentages or numbers then they wont have any formatting anyways.