This question is close to what I want, however the answers presented there all involve forcing Google Sheets to recognize the elements as strings. This solution does not work for me, however - the numbers in question are declination values (essentially, latitude, but for astronomy), and I need to run some math with them in other cells. So, keeping them as numbers is important. I'd like to be able to simply input them as, e.g.,
+12:34:56(this format is degree:arcminute:arcsecond), keeping the leading plus sign (preferably visible), without having Google Sheets immediately add an = to the front and then becoming confused when this thing that looks vaguely like a range of cells on the sheet is malformed. Is this possible?