I have a problem that plagues me persistently:

Whenever I enter what i consider ranges in a single cell ("1 - 30"),
Excel will interpret that as Jan-30. I do not want this behavior. I
wish Excel to format things as date ONLY if i Explicitly tell it that
the value is a date (if, for example, i format the cell as Date format
or enter something like "4/30/2004").

Is there anyway that I toggle off this behavior? Any help would be most
appreciated.