>>>I want Excel to treat text data as text even if the text may look like numbers.
>>>
>>>E.g. if I have character field that always contains digits only starting with valid digit I want Excel to recognize them as text and not as numbers.
>>
>>Still not inderstandable. If it is regarding the paerticular job you are doing, then give me an example to reproduce the behavior, and tell EXACTLY what you need.
>
>I have a CSV file. In this file the account number (which is supposed to be a character field) doesn't have quotes around it. Excel treats this column as a general format. I want this column to be treated as a text.

Then apply formatting to appropriate columns, like:

oExcel.Activesheet.UsedRange.NumberFormat = "@"