Method to get the original value as a string

[og3og]

This will prevent leading zeros from being removed.

[MarkBaker]

I'm not sure I see the point in this (and it won't work as you expect either).

If you've loaded a PHPExcel object from a spreadsheet file, it will retain any existing string values as strings (with any leading zeroes as appropriate).
If you're loading from a CSV file, or HTML, then you can use a value binder to retain any leading zero strings.... though I already implemented a change in version 1.8.1 to the default value binder to do this if a numeric string had leading zeroes anyway (Work Item GH-394 - DefaultValueBinder is too much aggressive when converting string to numeric).

If you're setting values with leading zeroes yourself, then use setCellValueExplicit() which will set the datatype to string by default, and retain any leading zeroes.

The original value without any formatting is already maintained in the $value property, as a value of the appropriate datatype.... you don't need a new property to maintain that explicitly as a string datatype, especially when the original might have been a Boolean or a rich text object.

[og3og]

Got it! thanks a lot for pointing me in the right direction.