Retaining column formatting

[nde]

I have data that is dumped into an Excel 2002 spreadsheet
and only column A needs always to be a custom
format "00000000000" so that leading zeros appear. To
avoid always having to reformat the new spreadsheet I
tried formatting the column and saving as a template but
this did not work. I know I can accomplish this by
running a macro each time, but is there not a way to
always open a template with the column A formatted as
desired to begin with?

Thanks