Workaround related to Metalink 760041.1

I would like to add a workaround regarding the mentioned metalink note:

BI PUBLISHER : Leading Zeroes Are Truncated When The Report Is Of Excel Format (Doc ID 760041.1)

We had the same problem here (non number field being converted to number and trimmed of leftmost 0s) and we managed to solve it the following way:

- Add an empty space at the start of the field, like this:

select ' '||Field from dual;

Hope it is of help for the rest of users.