Excel Column Data Type Issue

Ok, hopefully a simple issue with a simple fix. I'm importing data from an Excel spreadsheet with values such as: 10, 20, 20 Tall, 40, 40 Tall. The column imports but is treated as numeric with values 10, 20, 20, 40, 40. I set the cells to be treated as text in Excel. Any suggestions?Leave it to Microsoft to make this a painful process. Guessing data types is a nice feature and saves time, but sometimes, dang it, I just want to turn it off!

Anywho, try changing this registry key to 0 in order to change the default of scanning 8 rows to unlimited:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel|||Hi!

I have set the value in the registry (TypeGuessRows=0), but i still don't get the right data type.

What I have figured out:
Lets say I have 25 rows in my column in the Excel file. It that column 13 are numeric values and 12 are text. In this case the column gets indentified as a Numeric type.
Now if there are 12 numeric and 13 text values, then the type is set to text.

Is there any way to get JET engine indentify the coulmn type as text if there is only one text value?
It really sux if the type is determined by the majority of the values, this way there is no sence to increase the number of the sampled rows, as if you have more numeric values then the type will be numeric anyway.

Any help? Ideas?