Why would all text columns in an Excel spreadsheet begin with a leading single quotation mark

The apostrophe ' is a special character for Excel when it appears as the first character in a cell. It tells Excel to treat the rest of the string as text.

It can be removed by:

• Selecting the cells
• Then menu Data/ Text-to-columns

You can probably write a macro to automate this.

Alternatively export the data to csv and then import the csv file into your database.