Incidentally, I am already aware that placing a single apostrophe (') in
front of a cell value causes Excel to treat the value as text. I am looking
for a way to really turn off all auto-formatting permanently for all cells.

I have yet to find any way to permanently disable "Auto Number Formatting" in
Excel, programmatically or otherwise. I have, however, discovered that this
problem is much more serious than I had initially thought.

The following is a link to a report entitled "Gene name errors can be
introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics."

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80

And this is a link describing the problem on Microsoft Support:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214233/

This is an article describing WebDisableDateRecognition, which is
essentially what I need, except that it only works "when the query table's
QueryType property is set to xlWebQuery and the query returns an HTML
document." I use QueryTables.Add to add a query table of type xlODBCQuery.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbaxl11/html/xl
proWebDisableDateRecognition_HV05272589.asp

But again, I am actually looking for a way to GLOBALLY disable Auto Number
Formatting in Excel. I want to kill it, once and for all. Until Auto Number
Formatting is gone forever nobody can ever be sure that their data is safe
from corruption.

If I can't find a way to disable Auto Number Formatting, I am going to start
looking for an alternative to using Excel. So I hope that someone out there
knows an object or registry edit.

Thanks.