I have to use edit/replace in excel to format my information quite often. And
anytime I have a value that could be viewed as a date excel reformats the
cell and presents the numbers as a date (which they are not). ex:

6--12 in cell A1
edit replace "--" with "-" and you will get "12-Jun" instead of 6-12

I have also tried using the format option with edit/replace but I can not
find a way to get excel to stop converting my numbers to dates.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Eric