objws.Cells(rowindex, colindex).Value = "'" & fixedstring

prefix it with a single quote.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

"Bernie Yaeger" wrote in message
t...
I'm developing a vb .net function that creates a .xls or .csv for a vb
..net
dataset. The guts of the routine goes something like this:
objws.Cells(rowindex, colindex) = fixedstring

When I print fixedstring to the screen, it reads, for example, '00833',
but
once I save it, it becomes 833 and Excel sees it as a number, not text.
I've tried every file format I can think of, but regardless how I save it,
I
get the same result. Is there something I need to do to preserve prefix
'0's and the data type as string rather than numeric?

Thanks for any help.

Bernie Yaeger