BI/XML Publisher: Leading and Trailing zeroes truncated for excel reports

Microsoft Excel is too smart and it identifies whether the value in the cell is a Text or number and applies formatting accordingly. This sometimes becomes an issue for us when we are trying to generate an excel report. For example item number 0003463262360 has all the numbers and starts with zero, this when printed in excel report displays it as 3463262360. Hence all the leading zeroes are truncated. Same issue happens when we have decimal and trailing zeroes.

FO formatting options can be used to get away with this problem. Below is the syntax for same.

<fo:bidi-override direction="ltr" unicode-bidi="bidi-override">
<?ITEM_NUMBER?>
</fo:bidi-override>