OLEDB, Writing Excel cell without leading apostrophe

Question

I\'m writing to Excel file using OLEDB (C#). What I need is just RAW data format.

I\'ve noticed all cells (headers and values) are prefixed by apostrophe (\')

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Answer 1

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257819 has a statement to the effect that this behaviour might be unavoidable when inserting text into Excel via ADO:

A caution about editing Excel data with ADO: When you insert text data into Excel with ADO, the text value is preceded with a single quote. This may cause problems later in working with the new data.

Is the data explicitly text, might it be coerced into a numeric format? (clutching at straws...)