You need to circumbent Excel's error checking protocol. There may well be a better way to do this but if it were me, I would open Excel and create a new blank workbook. Next, click on the large circular button that appears at the top left hand of the screen just as if you were trying to save the file, and select the 'Excel options' Button. On the screen that pops open, look for the word 'Formulas' in the column on the left hand side and select that. Now, look down and you should see a series of check boxes under the title 'Error checking rules'. One of these should gave a label that reads something like the following - 'Numbers formatted as text or preceeded by an apostrophe'. This is most likely selected currently so click on it to deslect it - ensure that the check box is not selected - and then OK you way out of this back to the blank workbook.
Next, save the workbook as a template - it can be an xlsx file you do not need to save it as an xslt. Finally, open this workbook using POI and populate it with data. Hopefully, Excel will not try to convert the textual representations of numbers when the user interacts with the data on the sheet in future. There must be some way to accomplish this task using the API and I am confident someone else will know. For now thought, this may be a useful dodge because I do seem to remember that simply preceeding the number with a apostrophe did not work for some reason. Of course, this is another option you could try - writing "/'123" onto a cell rather than "123". Yours Mark B -- View this message in context: http://apache-poi.1045710.n5.nabble.com/How-to-set-Cell-Format-to-Text-tp3275568p3275613.html Sent from the POI - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
