Excel auto format changing 1-1 into date

Originally Posted by oldchippy

Try this, select the area/column you wish to paste into, right click and format the area/columns to TEXT, then go to your data, copy > paste special > TEXT

The result is all the data is pasted into the right rows but everything is in column A instead of A to I.

What I want is to turn off this stupid function. I’m never going to use dates in Excel.