>And one more thing ... the behavior seems to still be dependent on whether your database column's datatype is char or varchar. If you use varchar and your column is truly empty (no extra spaces), you won't see the xml:space="preserve" get added to the XML. But if your column is char, then it's never really empty ... it's always padded with spaces no matter what you do and so you'll get the stuff added to the XML. This is how it works in SQL Server anyway, I'm not sure if it's different or not for other databases.

Is VarChar the equivalent in C# than String in VB.Net?

Also, do you know why having spaces in a field would make the XML to react like that? In Excel, this is created an additional field and this is totally not related.