Linked table from Excel

[Idoia]

Hello,

I am linking an Excel spreadsheet to Access. One of the fields is "number of
claims", which is a numeric field. The problem is that the first few rows of
data in the spreadsheet are "N/A", then after a few rows, there are numbers.
Access automatically sets this field as TEXT, so when I open the linked
table, I get "N/A" for the first few rows, and #Num! for any row where
there's a number in excel.

I would like to force Access to recognise the field as numeric, and get an
error value for the text entries and the true number for the numeric values.
Any way to achieve this?

I can't change anything in the Excel spreadsheet.

Thanks in advance!