I have an Excel sheet containing variable length alphanumeric productIDs. The
productIDs always start with digits and may end with hyphen and characters,
eg. "12345-ABC".

When importing the sheet using
- MS-Access Import
- MS-SQL Server 2005 Import
- my own code using ADO.NET 2.0 via ODBC provider
I loose various parts of the table:

I set the Excel format to "text". However all the above mentioned tools
treat the column as Double/Decimal and do not let me change it.
(SQL Server import replaces the alphanumeric productID by NULL, MS-Access
and ODBC ignore the rows completely.)

How do I teach Excel to present the column as "text" to others?

thanks herbert