prevent Excel from EVERautomatically converting numbers to dates

in Excel v. X for Mac how do I permanently prevent Excel from EVER
automatically converting numbers to dates. Formatting individual cells
as text will not work in my applications. I need to disable this funtion.

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In article ,
"gt" wrote:

in Excel v. X for Mac how do I permanently prevent Excel from EVER
automatically converting numbers to dates. Formatting individual cells
as text will not work in my applications. I need to disable this funtion.