Google-sheets – What’s the difference in using the internal formatting and using TEXT to format cells

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What's the difference in using the Formatting drop-down and using =text() to format cells? Which one overrides the other or take priority? It seems I'm having some formatting conflict that is breaking my =unique() range and causing duplicates. Even though the rows looks the same, they are not de-duplicated.

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Best Answer

in essence, =TEXT() is superior over "drop-down" internal formatting because of higher priority:

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note: keep in mind that =TEXT() will convert the input into an actual chunk of text regardless of forcing numeric output with "0.0". to convert it back you need to use =VALUE()

note2: on 3rd image you can see that internal formating overrode function formula, however, this is a purely visual issue eg. in a sense we could say that internal formatting is superior in terms of visual outputs - otherwise not.

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