I'm using Excel to import tab-delimited text files containing a large
number of rows and columns. The data are mostly numerical, but some are
text.

Somehow, Excel insists in renaming certain values as if they were
dates. For instance I have a column with gene names, some of which with
names like "SEP10" or "DEC7"... and Excel sees that as a date and turns
it into "10-Sep"... In other cases renames entries such as "3-24" as
"24-Mar"...

How can I turn off EVERY automatic "intelligent" feature in Excel so
that it just takes what I feed it? I have gone through every menu
turning off automatic formatting and everything I could see... but that
behaviour remains.

I'm sure there must be a way to import these data so that numbers are
treated like numbers, and everything else as text... but I can't find
how, and I am finding it very frustrating.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Jose