How do I get it to stop converting to dates?

[snipescc]

Hi everyone. I've been having a problem lately. Excel loves to convert any number with a dash or slash in it into a date, and sometimes I really don't want it to. I'm text-to-columning a list of people who are assigned divisions in the format 01-01, and as soon as I do text to columns, it converts their division to a data, which I really don't want. The original cells look like this.
<table style="width: 352px; height: 36px;" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><col width="291"><tr height="20"> <td style="height: 15pt; width: 218pt;" width="291" height="20"> 01-01 D Smith John</td> </tr></table>In the past I have tried every cell format to get it to stop converting numbers that have a dash or slash in it to a date, and nothing has worked except putting a single quote mark in first. But I'd like to know if there is another way to get it to stop turning my divisions into dates.

 

[stu40]

The MS Excel development team are holding a feedback forum of suggestions for the next version of Excel. There is a submission to turn off auto date formatting here - Allow us to turn off automatic conversion to date. Please vote it up as a way of solving this issue.

 

[kalak]

The MS Excel development team are holding a feedback forum of suggestions for the next version of Excel. There is a submission to turn off auto date formatting here - Allow us to turn off automatic conversion to date. Please vote it up as a way of solving this issue.

Great idea!
I've spent too much time over the last couple of days trying to convert (what are possibly) American-style dates to English ones. Did it OK, but the time spent was in my view unnecessary.

Like when I get something like 3/5/15 is this 5th March or is it 3rd May?
Easy to convert between them if one knows where it came from, but how to know that?
If they could automatically convert to general format instead of date format then that would make it all so much easier.

 

[Rick Rothstein]

I'm text-to-columning a list of people who are assigned divisions in the format 01-01, and as soon as I do text to columns, it converts their division to a data, which I really don't want.

In the Text-To-Columns dialog box, at Step 3 of 3, select the column in the table with your dashed/slashed values and then select the Text option button... that will set the return values to text for that column in the output.