zero placeholder for data output

Im a teacher trying to make a rollbook. I have one cell that adds attendance and one that adds tardies. I display these cells with two digits for purposes of appending them later to a data string for our school,s computer. I found I could get the two digit display by going to cell-format-custom and putting in 00. While this shows a zero placeholder in my cells excell still ignores the leading zero when you try to append the two cells together into a string. I need to concatenate say 03 and 04 to be 0304. However what I get is 34. Maybe I need a different approach? Or maybe Im missing one small step.
Thanks for your ideas. :thanx:

Re: zero placeholder for data output

Thanks - that was exactly what I needed.