I've had the same problem and ended up using the xlsReadWrite package. It takes more time to import a sheet but does have the colClasses command.
Following your example: library(xlsReadWrite) read.xls("testtable", sheet = "sheet1", colClasses="character") should worked, it did for me -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/RODBC-forcing-a-special-column-to-be-read-in-as-character-tp2993624p3493081.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.