do not strip leading zero from sql to excel using dts

Stripping the leading zeros happens when you're dealing with that number as an integer or float or basically anything but a "text" fields (varchar, nvarchar, etc). Make sure that through the entire dts stream, you're keeping it as a varchar. DTS will try to make assumptions to the data type when placing it in excel. It will take a sampling of the first x number of rows and determine that should be a number and it then would likely strip out those zeros.  I don't have DTS installed on my computer now to tell you how to override that but it's in your mappings going to excel.

Problem is probably from Excel side. It automatically formats a column as a numeric value (thus stripping the leading zero's) from anything that can be converted to a number.

Try, casting the outgoing field as Varchar(x) and prefix with a single quote. The single quote forces Excel to make the receiving column a TEXT value (thus retaining zeros)

CAST( '''' + MyField as varchar(20)) as MyField2

P.S. four single-quotes are translated by SQL into a single single-quote ...

You can also change your export destination to a .txt file. Then open it up with excel and it will go into the Import Data routine and you can specify that the column should be text.

ok let me try this i'll get back to you in a few minutes

this is working great...i had one question though it now populates excel with a single quote in the begining and then the number which was exactly what was coded. is there a way though that we can have that single qoute but have excel display just the number..the people i'm sending this to are not so bright.

excel 2003 sp3 v.11