Question

I have a table in Access I am exporting to Excel, and I am using VBA code for the export (because I actually create a separate Excel file every time the client_id changes which creates 150 files). Unfortunately I lose the leading zeroes when I do this using DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet. I was able to resolve this by looping through the records and writing each cell one at a time (and formatting the cell before I write to it). Unfortunately that leads to 8 hours of run time. Using DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet, it runs in an hour (but then I lose the leading zeroes). Is there any way at all to tell Excel to just treat every cell as text when using the TransferSpreadsheet command? Can anybody think of another way to do this that won’t take 8 hours? Thanks!

Answer 1

prefix the Excel value with an apostrophe (‘) character. The apostrophe tells Excel to treat the data as “text”.

As in;

0001 'Excel treats as number and strips leading zeros

becomes

'0001 'Excel treats as text

You will probably need to create an expression field to prefix the field with the apostrophe, as in;

SELECT "'" & [FIELD] FROM [TABLE]