Instead of a trailing space, try a leading single quote (ascii 39).

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"Diggler" wrote in message ...
I am looking for the proper way to force formats on a columns when streaming an Excel spreadsheet to the browser based on a DataTable. I am using Asp.Net with C#. Data source is from SQL Server 2000. One column that I am having problems with has a varchar data format in the database; it has code numbers like:

595-1
595-9
595-17
etc.

When this shows up in Excel using OWC10, the data that is in the
format ###-## shows up properly, but the data that is in the format
###-# gets converted somehow to a number. For example, 595-1 gets
transformed in Excel to -476639. Why is this, and how can I get this
data to be treated as the string value "595-1"? I can 'hack' it by
adding a space after the value, like "595-1 " but I'd rather have the
clean data with no extraneous whitespace. I don't understand why this
is happening for some values and not others?