Can AI clean up a spreadsheet without changing your order numbers?

An order number can be all digits without being a quantity. If an AI assistant helps clean up a spreadsheet, turning that column into numbers can quietly change which order a row refers to. Microsoft's existing Excel guidance says automatic conversion can remove leading zeros and numeric storage has a maximum precision of 15 significant digits. It recommends importing identifier columns as text. The Automatic Data Conversions settings it describes are available in Microsoft 365 and Excel 2024, including their Mac versions. This is documented spreadsheet behavior, not a finding that a particular AI assistant caused it. I would give a cleanup assistant a small copy with an order ID starting with zero and another longer than 15 digits. Ask it to preserve the exact identifiers, then check them against the original after importing the result into the tool that receives the orders. A prettier cell display is not enough. If digits have already been lost, go back to the source rather than asking the assistant to guess them. Before letting it tidy the whole file, name the columns where every character must survive. That may save the person packing tomorrow's orders from finding out that a neat-looking sheet no longer matches the labels.