I have a html page which contains a table that I would like to export to
excel just by clicking a link. I can do this by specifying:

contentType="application/vnd.ms-excel"

This automatically opens excel and imports the html table directly into
it. This is fine for the most part. What my problem is, one of the
columns has IDs that has zeros in front (eg. 00001). In the html table,
it is displaying fine. But in the excel table it strips the zeros so
now my id is 1 when in fact I still want to display it as 00001. Any
ideas on how to do this or turn off this auto-formatting feature in
excel? TIA.