Forcing types in Excel connection?

I am using Crystal Reports 9 to build a report that involves connections to both an Excel spreadsheet and an Oracle database. The problem is, the Oracle database contains an ID field stored as text (although the data is currently strictly numeric). The same ID field appears in the excel spreadsheet. I am trying to join the spreadsheet to the database. My problem is that, since ID field in the spreadsheet contains only numeric data, Crystal Reports imports the field as a numeric field then expects it match to the Oracle database's text ID field! Obviously, this creates a type error and the report fails.

My question is: is there any way to force Crystal Reports to regard a field in Excel as text rather than numeric data? Changing the cell attribute to text in Excel didn't seem to work; Crystal still saw numbers in the field and assumed the data was numeric.

This is an urgent matter so any help at all would be appreciated. Thanks!When joining the tables convert oracles table's id to numericsql