Preserving style of manipulated strings

I posed this question in the iOS for Numbers community many months ago without success so I will try once more on this platform, understanding that a MacOS solution may or may not be adaptable to Numbers for iOS.

I would consider myself a prolific, veteran Numbers user (iOS) and I pride myself in my ability to produce some pretty advanced work in Numbers, taking my sheets (which are always designed entirely on my iPad) to the absolute limit of what Numbers for iOS was ever intended to do, and in some ways, perhaps beyond, as this is one of those cases that is not mentioned in any literature I have found.

Presentation matters to me (it’s why I work with Numbers rather than Excel) and I make liberal use of the ability to adjust the style of text, including font, size, colour, superscript or subscript, etc. Without a doubt, the options available to us allow for the construction of some truly beautiful sheets.

The best sheets are both stylish and functional, and this is where I get to my question. After having carefully styled the text in one cell so it is just right, I want to be able to manipulate that string such that I can splice it together with other strings of an entirely different style into a new string consisting of several concatenated string fragments, each retaining their original style. An couple of example of what I mean is shown below.

You can see that these string are a combination of 3 and 4 strings respectively of various colour, font size, or script. Each fragment retains its individual style, regardless of whether it was referenced directly or through an index match. These fragments form a string that can be combined further with other strings of various styles, all the while retaining the unique formatting of each of its component fragments, and in a way that is entirely dynamic and without the use of conditional formatting.

This is where I think I’m venturing into territory the software was never intended to enable. Of course, everyone knows how to format a static value in a cell as a rainbow, should they feel compelled to do so. But as soon as they look up that value in another cell, they’re going to get something formatted in the style of the cell containing the reference formula.... almost all of the time.

I say almost, because as the above screen makes clear, there is a way around this, which I have been making regular use of for a year now, but I still don’t entirely know how I did it, and couldn’t teach it if I tried. I enable the feature, or “trick” if you will, by copy and pasting a cell from the document in which I originally enabled it by accident a year ago, into a new document, and build from there.

It is clear that very specific conditions must exist to make it possible, as it is very sensitive. Only values in cells that have had the “trick” applied to them will retain their formatting when referenced, and applying the trick to those cells is often frustrating as I am still not clear what causes it. I have found that merging cells together seems to facilitate it more easily, as does formatting as text, but neither these actions alone nor even taken together will produce the desired result. Only through copy and pasting from a cell already exhibiting the desired result will it be made to work - and sometimes, not even then. It’s like trying to replicate a glitch (which may or may not be an approriate way to describe it) and not knowing exactly what enables it makes it impossible to devise a simpler, more consistent method of performing it. When done on a large scale it’s rather painstaking work.

99 of 100 people who read the above will scratch their head and wonder “huh?” We have some incredibly smart and experienced people here, so I hope this message finds that 100th person.