How to set a cell format to Text

You can try to set the cell-format to text via

DataFormat fmt = wb.createDataFormat();
CellStyle cellStyle = wb.createCellStyle();
cellStyle.setDataFormat(
    fmt.getFormat("@"));
cell.setCellStyle(cellStyle);

Note: CellStyles shoudl be re-used for all applicable cells, do not create new ones for every cell.

You could also try to use the "Ignore errors" feature in the .xlsx format, however support for it is not fully done yet, see Issue 46136 and Issue 58641 for some ongoing discussion.

See also this MSDN page for some additional information

Look like OP was asking for Apache solution. After some searching I found this answer:

HSSFCellStyle style = book.createCellStyle();
style.setDataFormat(BuiltInFormats.getBuiltInFormat("text"));

For HSSF,

    DataFormat fmt = workbook.createDataFormat();
    CellStyle textStyle = workbook.createCellStyle();
    textStyle.setDataFormat(fmt.getFormat("@"));
    sheet.setDefaultColumnStyle(0, textStyle);

It just sets the whole column style as Text and set category as Text .

However, if you are using XSSF format, it doesn't work(I am using Apache Poi 3.15 and didn't work for me). In this case you have set style to each cell you want to treat as text in addition to above code using:

cell.setCellStyle(textStyle);

Regarding error, you could use

sheet.addIgnoredErrors(new CellRangeAddress(0,9999,0,9999),IgnoredErrorType.NUMBER_STORED_AS_TEXT );

It ignores the NUMBER_STORED_AS_TEXT error for row 0 till 9999 and column 0 till 9999 and you wont see it.