question about find and replace

[Peter Alcibiades]

Thanks to everyone for help.  A confession though.  I'd gone through the
replies one evening, and decided to get some sleep and start trying them out
in the AM.  Its a bit more complicated than the original question, because
the numbers are embedded in a huge pile of xml.  Anyway, I slept deeply and
dreamlessly, and woke with a start, and a lateral idea,  which is sort of
like what the replies suggest, but done very differently.  

First thing was to export to a tab delimited file, open in spreadsheet, copy
out the column with the numbers into a different file, save as csv.  The
reopen, and now set the delimiter to "."  This puts the components of the
number into differerent colums.   Now you can use the pad function of the
formatter in the spreadsheet to pad them out.  Save, and then open them with
tab as the delimiter.  This, the trick of changing the delimiter to split
the column, was really what came from the suggestions, in a lateral way. 
Then you can copy the new edited column over the old one, in the original
spreadsheet, and then re-import back into the original app.  Took almost no
time, and more important, it was pretty foolproof because of only working on
the column to be changed, so no untoward effects.

But I would never have got it except for the suggestions, which now all go
into the scrapbook for a time when there is no plan B.  Thanks.
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