How to enforce data types on export to excel

[tekkyun]

Hi,
I have several reports which users can choose to export to excel. To do this I use:-
DoCmd.OutputTo acOutputReport, stDocName, acFormatXLS

These reports have been working fine but I have now come across a problem.
Some of the text data fields have letters embedded with a series of numbers, eg 1234E123. When this is exported to Excel, it is automatically converted to scientific number format.
I have tried concatening the field with leading space prior to export to force conversion to text format but this didn't have any effect.

Does anyone know of an easy way to overcome this?

 

[earthandfire]

Prepend an apostrophe ie '1234E123

Hope this helps

 

[tekkyun]

Yes, that works but it looks a bit odd on the xls file.
Is there an 'invisible' character that I could use instead?