There are often requirements to generate Excel reports from Database applications.

In such scenarios, I often generate valid Html from the data, and export it with a .xls extension relying on Excel capabilities to process Html.

In such recent scenario, I was preparing a report, which had the following in it:

<td>06-07</td>

Excel automatically rendered it as 7 Jun. Clearly this is not the desired behavior. I wrapped it as:

<td><![CDATA[06-07]]></td>

This time Excel showed nothing in the cell. I even tried wrapping it in <pre>, but Excel now simply used a different font, but still rendered it as 7 Jun.

Is there any way to specify in Html that Excel should display the data as is without applying any transformations whatsoever??