 <p>When you open the exported data file directly with Excel, all formats are set as General. In General format, Excel applies formatting to what it recognizes as numbers and dates. So, to be clear, the issue is not with your export, but rather with how Excel is reading your data by default. Try the following to get around this issue.</p> <p>Export to CSV. Then, rather than opening the CSV in Excel, use Excel's '<strong>Get External Data From Text</strong>' tool to import the data into an empty workbook. Here you can specify to treat this field as TEXT rather than as GENERAL.</p> <p>Note that once Excel applies number (or date) format to a cell, the data in the cell has been changed. No application of a new format will bring back your desired data. For this reason you must specify the format <em>before</em> Excel opens the file.</p>