read excel with mostly empty cells. how to make oledb read this column as int?

hi all,
i am trying to import data from excel to database. i know that we can set oledb to read about 16,000 rows to decide which data type to assign to certain column. my situation is that, the excel file will come from the user. it will contain about 30,000 rows of data. for a few columns, majority of the row data for that column is empty. like 25,000 empty value and the other 5000 contains integer value.
based on the way oledb is intepreting the data type, this column will be stored in the database as string? but i need this column to be stored as integer. what can i do? can anybody help?
p/s: the program will create a new database table each time an excel is imported.
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