title: SSIS excel formatting wont change from text field in destination editor **work around in place**
body: <p>I have created an SSIS package in Visual Studio 2008 that take's a SQL select statement and populates a excel sheet, the excel sheet is duplicated from a template file with all the formatting and cells set up.</p>
  
  <p>The issue I am having is that no matter what I do I can not change the excel destination formatting to anything other than general, it overwrites the source destination and puts decimal numbers a '1.50 always adding the ' to fields. </p>
  
  <p>i have tried inserting a row as per some suggestions as people think this is where SSIS scans for formatting types. However the field always comes up as <code>Unicode string [DT_WSTR]</code> in the advance editor and always defaults back if i change them.</p>
  
  <p>Please can someone help! Happy to provide any additional info if I've missed anything, I've seen some posts with the same issue, but none of the solutions seem to be working or i'm missing something else.</p>
  
  <p>****Update****
  Figured out the reason behind none of the recommended fixes working,  this was due to using a select statement in the excel destination instead of selecting the table.
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/RQZJA.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>This essentially wipes out any change if changing formatting.</p>
  
  <p>So what I decided in the end was to create a data only sheet(which is hidden) using the basic table data access mode, then reference that in a front end sheet with all the formatting all ready in and using a <code>=value(C1)</code> formula to return just the value. Protected the cells to hide the formula's.</p>