import excel bombs

Hopefully a simple question for Access 2000: I’m importing (through a VBA script and transferSpreadsheet) an excel spreadsheet. One of the columns is a cost center ID which may contain numbers and/or letters. If the first 25 Excel rows contain nothing but numeric cost center IDs, the import wizard seems to assume the column should be numeric (even though both the spreadsheet column and the receiving table column are text fields) and drops any subsequent IDs that have letters in them. If it sees an ID in the first 25 with a letter, all’s good. Any way to fix this? Is there a setting that I can change so that the Access import wizard looks at more than 25 rows? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks