I've had the same problem and ended up using the xlsReadWrite package. It
takes more time to import a sheet but does have the colClasses command.
Following your example:
library(xlsReadWrite)
read.xls("testtable", sheet = "sheet1", colClasses="character")
should worked, it did for me
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RODBC: forcing a special column to be read in as character
1 message · Jack T.