I am an accountant that uses Excel extensively in my work. On a very regular
basis, I enter account numbers, often in formats that Excel is programmed to
recognize as dates, and as a result it frequently (and incorrectly) reformats
the data I enter as a date. Now, when I'm posting hundreds of account
numbers from the clipboard, it is very time-consuming, not to mention
frustrating, to have to go back and manually correct each one.

Obviously, I can't just highlight the affected cells and change the format
back, since the date format actually changes the data in the cell. I've also
tried "pre-formatting" the page as well, but have had little success.

I've searched extensively through Excel's menus, and have found no way to
disable or override this autoformat feature. If there is a way to do this in
Excel 2003, I'd appreciate hearing about it. If there isn't, I think it
would be a very helpful feature on a future version of Excel. I find it odd
that a program as powerful as Excel would have such a frustrating quirk.