-----Original Message-----
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.
.

you might want to make sure that you have that cell
formatted as "general".