Pasting HTML table with feet/inches column, excel changes it to da
 

I am copying a web page table with a roster into excel. The table includes
one column with height x-zz where x is feet and zz is inches. Pasting to
excel (there is no paste special option) this column converts to a date where
6-1 becomes 01-Jun, 5-10 becomes 10-May, and 6-0 becomes Jun-2000. 1) Is
there a way to paste this information so that it is not converted to a date?
2) Is there a way to easily convert the date back to feet-inches? (It would
be trivial if the even feet weren't changed to a different year.) 3) What is
the easiest way to get around the problem? The best I have come up with would
be to paste to a text file, line up the columns, save the file as text, open
the text file in excel with each line in a cell, convert text to columns
using the fixed width option and treat the feet-inches column as text. Is
there an easier way? (A related question is how to display the feet-inches as
x-zz, but I posted that one separately.)