I am doing a small integration between two systems. One system exports
data (I have no control over this) to Excel and I am reading from the
Excel file to use the data elsewhere.

Everything is fine except for one problem: it is possible that I will
have a value for a cell such as "0000". This is intended to be a
string (eventually, when I import it). It shows up in the Excel
interface as "0000", but whenever I read from the cell it comes back
as "0". I guess Excel assumes it is a number.

Is there a way around this where I can get the value of a cell via
code (I am using C# for reference) as is (eg "0000", not "0")?

I am sorry if this has been previously asked, I was having a hard time
getting accurate search results for this topic.

Many thanks.