How do you stop excel from changing the date format during find and replace?

When I remove "Release date:" from "Release date:24 December 2008," excel will automatically change the text to "24-Dec-08." Yes, I did try to format the column to "text" before using find and replace.

This wouldn't be a problem, except that half the dates are in Dutch, so only half the dates are changed, which means that I can't make all date formats in a column uniform.