Maintaining text data format in a pivot table
 

I am creating a simple pivot table with one field of values, numbers to be
summed, and a second field, occasional two letter alpha codes which are purely
descriptive and refer to the number in the same column, "row".
In the source spreadsheet, I have formatted the column which contains these
codes as "Text". Text is supposed to remain unchanged; however when that
column of data is entered into the pivot table as a value, it is handled as
though it were numeric data, and these two letter codes do not appear. All
the possible definers of the field are numeric operators like "Count" and
"Sum", which do not apply to an alpha code, which is just supposed to be
represented literally. Further I see no way to manipulate this data field to
be recognized as text in the pivot table itself.
How do I get the pivot table to just take this alpha data as is?
Thanks,
Eric