Hmm, neither of these solutions really works well in the enviornment this file comes from. It is opened out of a source control program and manually opening the file via the open file wizard would be time consuming, since the true path to the file is quite burried in a ton of folders.

The actual data has to stay 2005-8-15, as adding quotes to it would break the program reading the file just as much as the automunging currently does.

Changing the format on the cell is also time consuming, since it would have to be done every time the file is opened. Storing it as anything except a .tab text formatted file is not possible, as it has to be in that format to later be read by the program that uses it.

The current workaround right now is to edit the file in Excel, then save and open the tile in a text editor and manually fix the dates. Working on it only in the text editor is a nightmare because the real file this came from is much larger and with many more columns. However, if someone forgets to fix the dates, the program crashes on startup because the data is invalid.