How to keep leading zeros when formating numbers to text in Excel?

I am trying to format and a number column as a text column in excel. When I try to do this with just basically formatting the cells as text it drops the leading zeros. Therefore for example the 8 digit number is "00012329". When I moved the records into excel it dropped the leading zeros. I did a custom number format so everything would have 8 digits and to add in the zeros that were dropped. However, the data needs to be formatted as text, so how do I do this without it dropping the zeros and having to add them back manually. It's about 1000 records so I need a way to do this quickly.