Export to Excel: numbers and dates are coming in as text

Export to Excel: numbers and dates are coming in as text

 When I export a table's contents and choose the Excel spreadsheet option, upon opening the document Excel gives me that little green diamond and alert box that says that "numeric data is stored as text" (same for dates). I have to select that column and tell Excel to convert it to a number before I can do anything useful. This is not a show-stopper, though it is annoying and I would love to see it fixed.

Cheers,

Kevin