Those are your only 2 options:

Precede with an apostrophe or pre-format as TEXT

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"PeteeWJ" wrote in message
...
Is there any way to make Excel stop automatically formatting text as a
date?
Specifically I want to be able to type 4-6 without it converting it to a
date, and I don't want to have to type an apostrophe before everything.
Is
there a way to just turn this auto formatting off, besides formatting the
cells as text before hand?