>Naomi,
>
>Thanks for the input. Unfortunately that didn't work. I've been trying different senarios and it seems that when there are more numeric values than character values in the column it is brought in as numeric; if more character values than numeric is comes in as character. Very strange.
>
>Do you have any other thoughts?
>
>Steve

Well, the worse case scenario you can add some character (not in the data) to the beginning of all cells. Also, have you tried manually changing the type of the field in Excel (say, set it as Text)?