Hi Herbert,

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?

I suspect the first couple of records only contain numeric codes, right?

AFAIK, both import routines (MSAccess and MSSQL) use the first n rows to
determine filed type.

What happens if you prepend all codes with a single apostrophe:

'1234
'2345
'3456
....

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
Excel MVP
http://www.jkp-ads.com
Member of:
Professional Office Developer Association
www.proofficedev.com