You cannot "set" Excel to stop thinking those are dates.

You can work around it though.

Preface the data with an apostrophe. These won't be visible in the cell.

Or pre-format the cells to Text before data entry.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Tue, 11 May 2010 09:53:01 -0700, chemdog
wrote:

Whenever I enter numbers, like 3-8 (meaning 3 to 8) I get 8 mar or 3/8/10.
How can I set Excel not to do this