That's strange. EVerytime I export from access to excell, it treats anything in a text field as a string (ie print("0003")) and drops it in excel. What version of excel? One thing you might want to try is converting to plain text first, comma delimited values and see if you can import that txt file into access. It will read everything in dbl quotes as strings, not numbers.

Otherwise, in excel, you will need to lead numbers with a ' in order to maintain it's format.