The parent post says: "Excel interprets a number and then formats it as a number, but in healthcare, 10 digit numbers are really strings." - so I was under impr

The parent post says: "Excel interprets a number and then formats it as a number, but in healthcare, 10 digit numbers are really strings." - so I was under impression that the length for that particular column is fixed - probably just misunderstood the sentence. I wonder how human operators figure out if the value is correct, or the Excel messed it up, or the input was invalid in the first place? If it's even possible to do it reliably then probably there is some set of patterns and methods that possibly could be turned into an algorithm... just thinking out loud here, but seems as an interesting problem to tackle...