A probably-stupid Excel question

I’ve got a whole column of cells conatining text in the format “2013/5/4” (they’re just reference numbers, nothing involving calculations or formulas). I’m trying to do find-&-replaces on these, but Excel keeps on deciding that because they look like dates, they need converting to British date format and everything gets changed to “04/05/2013”. How can I stop this happening? (Format - Cells - Text hasn’t helped.)

Before you copy stuff like that into them, you need to tell Excel that the cells will contain text by formatting the empty cells as text (perhaps formatting the whole column as text). Then use the “Paste Special” function to specify that you want to paste the data as “Text” or “Unicode Text”.

If you prefix the replace value with an apostrophe, it should force the value to be treated as text, I think.

This didn’t work - there’s no option for that in Paste Special (this is on Excel 2000).

That worked - although with a ‘z’ rather than an apostrophe, which got treated as a wildcard when I try to find&replace to remove it afterwards!

Thanks to both of you.