Excel auto-interprets dates - infuriating!

[VIIcards]

I am trying to cut and paste various data fields into Excel, and one of the fields is a number followed by a hyphen followed by another number. For instance: 5-27 or 7-98. These are *NOT* dates, but Excel interprets them as such and does so as May-27 or Jul-98. I have tried to format the column and the whole sheet as "text" cells prior to pasting, but the data actually causes Excel to override my formatting and it *STILL* incorrectly interprets these expressions as dates. I'm going to have a date with a therapist soon if I can't fix this. I've searched tools/options, but nothing jumps out at me as a way to tell Excel to cease and desist this annoying practice. Are there any out there that have encountered and/or solved this issue? Help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[SQUIDD]

Before you paste could you not click paste special option and set it to paste values

Dave

 

[VIIcards]

Well, you're half-right, but your suggestion did make me go further. When cutting and pasting from this website, and then going into Excel/Edit/PasteSpecial, I am not given the tradition pop-up menu of choices, which would normally include the option to paste values only. Instead, I have this menu of three choices: Paste it as HTML, Unicode Text, or just plain text. Naturally, I opted for text, but that *still* doesn't get the job done, and Excel misinterprets some numbers as dates. However, if I pre-format the cells to be text only and then paste it in as text, that works. As much as I love excel, I despise "intuitive" software that assumes something that isn't so. Just as Ben Franklin said that liberty shouldnt be sacrificed for safety, functionality shouldn't be sacrificed for user-friendliness.

Grant