Is there a way to force a numeric entry to be viewed as text?

The number is recorded correctly in Jotform spreadsheet.  However, I have the data sent to a Google Spreadsheet where it is interpreted as a number, and shows up as a floating point number:

2.84171E+17

Is there a way to force a numeric entry to be viewed as text?

I see that the Submission ID in the Google spreadsheet has a "-" appended to the number forcing it to be read as text.

Did you mean you are trying to force it to be viewed as text without the appended "-" (hyphen)? Or what exactly did you mean by that?

The hyphen is intended to force it to be read by google spreadsheet as text so long as you have enabled your submissions to be viewed in your submission viewer.

I checked on this anyhow and I am not currently seeing a problem in my test of this.

I additionally looked on your account, but you have quite a few accounts. Was there a particular form you are seeing this happen on?

Hello, here is what I'm trying to do - students apply to our program and consequently there is an "Application Submission ID".  We need to collect letters of recommendation and match these letters to the application.  So, I send the "Application Submission ID" in an email to the recommender and request this be inputted into the recommendation form.  When I did this without the "-" the submitted "Application Submission ID" displayed ok in the Jotform submission, but in the Google Spreadsheet it was interpreted as a number, see the screen shot below.  Appending a "-" seems to fix it.

Thank you for the clarification and I'm glad to hear that helped to work this out for you. 

Something else I would alternatively like to point out is that you could also use our Unique ID Widget to generate an incremental Application ID set at the same rate which might be of interest.