Convert numbers to text

I’m writing a VB application to create customised price lists from an exported excel product list (40,000 items). Because the source data is sorted alpha-numerically my DAO control sets the data type to numeric and consequently ignores any alphabetic product codes. The opposite occurs if the list is reversed. At present I’m having to create a temporary copy of the product file with an extra column containing the formula =MID((“”#”” & RC[1]),2,(LEN(“”#”” & RC[1])-1))to force the text data type. Is there a cleaner way to do this using the recordsource property or some other method using VB?