Access Question

Okay.

I have an Access97 database front end with a SQL 2000 backend. Here is one of my problems - I am going to start small and work my way up.

I have a text field that contains numbers. Example 0003. The reason it is a text field is because of the leading zeros. I need to extract this field to excel. The problem is, when I extract the field it turns it into a number and drops the zeros. I have tried using a string function. I have tried adding an ' before the first 0. I have tried formatting the field. So far nothing seems to work. Does anybody have any suggestions???