Report in Excel Truncating Zeros

I have a report which has a column that is treating the column as a number and truncating important leading zeros. In the DB it is stored as a varchar, but when dumped to an excel report the leading zeros are stripped. I tried numberFormat = 0 on the table in the report but that didn’t help.

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As a temp solution, I added a ’ at the front just to force it, but is there a way to properly fix this?