I'm using OfficeOpenXml to create an MS/Excel spreadsheet file. Some of the columns contain arbitrary text values. However, when cells in those columns are filled with numeric values (i.e., text values containing only digits), Excel displays those cells with a small green triangle in the corner, along with the warning that "The number in this cell is formatted as text or preceded by an apostrophe".
Which is technically correct, but I do not want Excel to display the warning.
So how do I format those columns, or the cells in those columns, to be strictly text values, so that they will not be flagged as numeric text values? How do I disable the warning, and force Excel to accept those cell values as text (only)?
Note: I've seen solutions for other OpenXML packages, but none specifically for OfficeOpenXml. I've also seen solutions for interpreting text cell values as numbers, but this is the exact opposite of what I want to do.
Another solution is to us LoadFromText, which fills the cell text and seems to suppress the 'numeric text' warnings for the cell. So I use code like this for filling the cells that have this problem:
DataRow dr = ...; // Query result row
...
cell[r, c].LoadFromText(Convert.ToString(dr["item"]));