Office XP

How can I put date information in a cell and tell Excel to leave the thing alone as the text I intended and not automatically convert the input to some sort of date equivalent? I've tried formatting the cell as text or as general or as ... and cannot stop Excel from changing the input to a date format.

Put a single apostrophe (') in front of the date information.

Is there a way to format an entire column to ignore Excel's date default & date math?

Try seting the cells to text BEFORE you enter data. Text formatted cells seems to prevent many automatic conversions and formattings.