this got me closer. Unfortunately I lose the decimal
precision of the original value. For example, say the value in the
cell officially was 3.1412563, but I had the cell  rounded to 3.1.
After running the macro  with a tweak one way or the other I end up
with (3) or (3.1412563).

It's like I need to capture not the specific value of the cell, but
the displayed value.