I often cut and paste information from web pages into excel so that I can
manipulate that data. However if the data has numbers seperated by "-" then
it is automatically identified as a date and converted into the excel date
format. This corrupts the underlying data.

Eg. a cell on the web reads "5-22". This gets automatically converted to
1/5/1922 when pasted into a cell (pre-formated as text)l and the format
automatically changed to "custom" "mmm-yy" and displayed as "May-22". By this
stage it's too late to manually convert it back to text as the underlying
value has been changed into a date format of "44682".

Can anyone suggest a solution to this for me...
Please note the following...
I have no control over the starting data so cannot insert characters into it.
Some of the fields within the data are text including spaces, "-", ".", etc

Thanks in advance PaddyD.