Excel Text Conversion Problem
 

A table's field I use in Access (2003) is made up with 4 digits, a dash, and
2 more digits and is obviously designated as text. Using the OutputTo action
within a macro, a subset of the table is created in Excel (97-2003) format.
Witnin the Excel worksheet (2003) some of the field entries convert just
fine, i.e., 0515-82 and 0634-00 appear properly in Excel. However, those
fields that have a zero after the dash followed by an integer are converted
into 5 or 6 digit, mostly negative numbers. For example, 0427-04 becomes
-537910, 0450-05 becomes -529479 and 0185-05 becomes -626329, but 0040-02
becomes 14642 and 0001-05 became 38722. Less important (but interesting)
is, why is it happening? More importantly is, how do I prevent it from
happening?

Thanks