Again, you can try switching to the DDE method of connecting to Excel, as
described in my earlier reply. Instead, you /may/ find that changing the
format of the cells in this column in Excel to "Text" changes things, but
generally speaking when you connect using the default method (OLEDB), the
provider tries to determine what type of data is in the column depending on
what is in the first few rows (8 or 25, I think). If it finds lots of
non-numeric items near the top, it will probably treat the column as text.
If it finds mostly numbers near the top, it will probably treat it as
numeric and change non-numeric values to 0 or blank. If you do not have too
many columns (max. about 63) you could also consider cutting/pasting your
Excel sheet into a Word document and using that as your merge data source.

Peter Jamieson