Data is not coming in

I can get the connection to work to our AS400 system. I can pull in any field that is declared as a number. Any field that is delcared a "text" or string field does not come in. We do have one field that is a number but declared a string, but when I take it *1 in my select statement it does populate. Same goes for another field if I take the front letter off and multiple whats left by one it comes in too. There is something there with the text fields. I built the same query in Access and it worked. I need excel.