These are two suggestions that I follow (by necessity) all the time.
The reason why I would like this is because I often open up a text file
from Excel and many of the "1 - 30" or "2 - 5" are in random cells and i
do not wish to format everything as text.

Are you saying that there is no way to force Excel not to coerce these
strings to Dates?


Tom Ogilvy wrote:
Format the cell as text before you make the entry.

or

preceded the value with a single quote

'1-30