Orrie,

It worked fine for me. It read it as being the 1st of January 2009, and
displayed as Jan-09.
Mind you, my date/time locale(location) is English(United Kingdom).

One way round it is to custom format the range of cells as mmmm yy
(Ctrl+1 to summon the Format Cells dialog box).
Then if you type in Jan 09 and press enter, Excel does the rest for you,
displaying January 09.
It is still a date, and can be seen in the edit box above the spreadsheet as
the 1st of that month.
Numbers and dates etc are alot easier to work with/manipulate than text.
Avoid the text option if you can.

Regards
Paul


"Orrie" wrote in message
...
Hi,
I maintain a list of new members to a club, and enter the new list of
new members for each month. I just want to separate the new members
for each month by entering the month's name in a cell. This will not
be used in any calculations. So, each month I need to enter the name
of the month and the year as text, like this January 09 (or January
2009 would do as well.) But after I type it in and move to the next
cell, Excel 2003 switches the entry to this format: 9-Jan

How can get Excel to accept what I enter and treat as simply text, not
a value. It is not necessary to use the month and year in any
calculations.

Thank you.

Orrie