issue with open row set accessing excel

I am using a openrowset  to read an excel spreadsheet in sql 2014

SELECT LICENSE
      ,LAST
      ,FIRST
      ,MI
      ,DESIGNATION
      ,BIRTHDATE
      ,ADDRESS1
      ,ADDRESS2
      ,CITY
      ,STATE
      ,ZIP
      ,TELEPHONE
-- ,ORIGINALISSUEDATE
FROM OPENROWSET('Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0', 'Excel 8.0;HDR=YES;IMEX=1;Database=\\testserver\c$\IDPRUpload\IDPRUpload.xlsx', 'select * from [IDPR$]')




all is working well except one of the columns in the excel spreadsheet has a mix of dates and phone numbers (if I don't include this column in select it works fine)

so it is treating everything as a date and thus when gets to value that is a phone number it is blowing up with error converting data type



I thought using imex=1 would prevent it from trying to identify column as date but still same error

I need to be able to return all the values as varchar to identify some input errors

Is there something else I need to do?