That does indeed prevent Excel from reformatting numbers into dates, but it also destroys the rest of the format and all text gets cramped into a single cell or awkwardly stretched with lots of empty cells between. Format is okay, I just don't want any no reformatting.

Thanks anyway, though. I guess there's just no way to turn off that stupid date formatting.

It's hard to say. Not having seen what you are trying to do, I don't know if there is any way to work around it. Post your file. Maybe fresh eyes will help.

Indeed, there is none that I know of. You would think there could be an option to disable it for a sheet, but perhaps it's more complicated than we can imagine to do so.