How to tell c# OleDb driver for excel to always read as text?

[justduick]

I am using the Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0 provider to read from an excel doc into my visual studio c# application... I know that using the property IMEX=1 will cause the reader to always read "intermixed" types as text. However, it appears that if the first cell in the column is a number and later cells are text, even with this property all cells are not interpreted as text. So does anyone know if in this situation there is a way to tell the provider to read all cells, no matter what, as text?

thanks.

[justduick]

is there really no way to do this?

for a work around is there a way to automatically insert a row of "a"s right below my header row so that automatically every column will be considered text and I won't have to worry about intermixed columns?

i'm surprised one seems to have had this issue.

thanks.