title: Force Excel 2007 to treat all values in a column as text
body: <p>I have a large column of data in Excel.  This data should all be treated as text, but in some cells Excel is "magically" changing the data to numeric.  This is screwing up my vlookpup() functions in another part of the spreadsheet, and I need to override Excel's automatic data type detection.</p>
  
  <p>If I manually go through the cells, and append ' to each numeric cell, it works. I just don't want to do this by hand for several thousand cells.</p>
  
  <p>For example, this works:
  Manually type <code>'209</code></p>
  
  <p>And this does not work:
  Manually type <code>209</code>, right click and format as text.</p>