I am generating a report with vb .net in a .xls sheet but my numbers are stored as text. how can I fix this?

The number of hours is saved as text and not as number. Any ideas?
[vb]
...
While i < dsetTask.Tables("tblTask").Rows.Count
            drowData = Data.NewRow()
            drowData("Name") = dsetTask.Tables("tblTask").Rows(i)("Name")
            drowData("Hour") = dsetTask.Tables("tblTask").Rows(i)("Hour")
End While
...
[/vb]
I tried to CType the right-hand-side of the drowData("Hour")=... to type Single or Double, still gives me cells with numbers in them but it says that the numbers are stored as text. WHAT DO I DO? :(

I am doing it in visual studio .net with an aspx page that queries the database and feeds the html to the browser with a mime type so it will be rendered in excel. The problem is that numbers will be stored as text! MSDN has the exact same thing in one their examples: http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...kb;en-us;317719

I have tried this with Northwind database like the example and it works fine! when I do it with my database the numbers remain as text.

What do you think is the problem and how do I solve it?

sorry about the broken link, here it is:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;317719