So our clients have to turn in Excels with Date fields among others, when loading one of these into my program suddenly my IDE throws an exception. I debug and find out that a particular cell on a Date column is responsible: 22/10/2014.

The cell is formatted the same as all other date cells, and the actual value doesn't (apparently) differ in format from the others in the same Excel, but somehow my program can't format it to 22-oct-2014, it will fetch 22/10/2014 literally as a String, leading to a crash. Too big of a thing to control the issue inside the logic.

The question would be, IS THERE ANY CHAR IN A KEYBOARD THAT COULD MAKE MY PROGRAM NOT TO INTERPRET THE VALUE AS A DATE, BUT STILL OVERCOME EXCEL'S CELL VALIDATION? If not, please you are welcome to throw in some ideas.

Thank you for the support.