ASP export to Excel - text formatting problem

[jmartmem]

Greetings,

I have a Classic ASP-based webpage that, on the click of a button, generates a dynamic result set that exports into Microsoft Excel using the following method:

<% Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel" %>

There's one field in the Excel export that gets messed up because Excel reads it as a number, not text, so it looks like this: 9.1561282123729 7E+21. The field displays correctly when the recordset is displayed in the browser.

Does anyone have any suggestions how I can pass the exported value to Excel so it will display correctly?

Regards,

j

[jhardman]

Excel prefers that you escape numerical values with an apostrophe ("'98765" instead of "98765"). Try that and see if it works.

Jared

[jmartmem]

Very clever, Jared. I didn't think of that. I put an apostrophe in the result set code and it works. The apostrophe appears in the field, but at least I can see the value now. Thanks.