In our application we have the option to display length measures also as fractional feet and inches, e.g. 2" 10 1/8'

With decimal length measures we can use the actual decimal value as the cell value and use a format string to display it nicely e.g. value = 10.3876 is shown as 10.39m using Format = "0.00m". This is nice because any calculations are made using the full precision and sorting & filtering works correctly (as opposed to using a string value "10.39m"

The question is if there is any way to avoid using string values for the fractional feet and inch values? Is it possible to have the value be the numeric decimal value and what is displayed to the user the formatted fractional value? If needed we can give both the decimal number and the formatted string as input parameters.