Thanks to all that replied to my question.

All the suggestions required user intervention, something that we cannot
always be assured that it would be
performed correctly.

What I was hoping for, was some way of 'tagging' the field and forcing
Excel  to treat is as text.  Single and
double quotes do not work.

A consultant that I know, who is very familiar with Excel, indicated that
on a previous job they had to prefix
every payroll number with a "1" just to 'get around' this "we know better"
feature of Excel, and that repeated
attempts to get an answer from microsoft produced no results.

Regards

Paul Christidis

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