HTML to Excel: How can tell Excel to treat columns as numbers?

Question

I need to achieve the following when opening an HTML in Excel (Response.contentType=\"application/vnd.ms-excel\") :

• force Excel to consider conten

Answer 1

If you add a CSS Class to your page:

.num {
  mso-number-format:General;
}
.date {
  mso-number-format:"Short Date";
}

And slap those classes on your TD's, does it work?

34
17.0
12/17/2008 

Update: Additional formatting options from @Aaron.