Force string format in export to Excel

[Miles]

I'm currently exporting to Excel a RadGrid and I have some cells that have the text "1 / 10" meaning that they had 1 hour used for 10 units. When this gets to Excel, it thinks the cell is a date, so it changes the cell to be January-10 which is not what I'm wanting.

I've gone the other direction before (changing a string to a number/date by setting the cell style's mso-number-format property) but I've never had the issue where I needed to make Excel keep the cell as a string and not try to change the format.

How do I do this? I've tried adding a apostrophe to the beginning of the cell text:

e.Cell.Text = String.Format("'{0}", e.Cell.Text);

but that seems to just make Excel display two apostrophe's at the start of the cell.

I'm using an older version of the Grid (2010.2.929.40)

[Miles]

bump...

[Kostadin]

Hello Miles,

In your case the excel automatically format the cells value to Date format so by using the mso-number-data attribute you could explicitly change the format to string. I prepared a small sample and attached it to this thread. I hope this helps.

Regards,
Kostadin
Telerik