Precede the entry with an apostrophe, as in '14/1, or pre-format the cell(s)
as text before you enter data.

Regards,
Fred.

"GW" wrote in message
...
When entering data which could be seen to be a date, such as the
characters
14/1 meaning Under 14 division 1 which is a soccer team, Excel overrides
the
general format of the field and converts the data to date format. There
are
many other instances where Microsoft feels it knows better than me the
type
of data I am trying to enter. Is it possible to prevent this from
happening?