title: How can I get POI to interpret a large Excel cell as a long?
body: <p>I have an excel spreadsheet that has one very large numeric column. I need to read it as a very large number (string) but excel displays it in scientific notation, and POI show it to me the same way. I have tried setting the data format to &quot;0&quot; or &quot;General&quot; which should preclude the conversion but it does not.</p>
  <pre><code>Cell input: 50222222222222222222 
  Excel shows: 5.0222222222222197E+19
  POI gets: 5.0222222222222197E+19
  </code></pre>
  <p>This is a serial number and must be exact.
  I understand the problem is, a numeric field is read as a double. If I could somehow convert that to a long (and then to a string) I would be a happy coder. I don't care if the solution is to change the column format (which didn't work for me) or a java conversion.</p>