When I type "September 2008" as a column header into a cell in Excel, it decides that what I really want to say is "Sep-08". If I had wanted Sep-08, I would have typed Sep-08.

I know that I can force it to accept September 2008 by putting a leading space ahead of September, forcing the cell into text mode, and I can format the cell (or row, or column) to do what I want if I do it before I enter the data. [No, actually, "mmmmmmmmm yyyy" is not one of the accepted Date formats] But surely there is a global default that I can set to tell Excel to stop trying to second-guess my date entries. Isn't there?

I have a similar complaint about entering a mm-dd date as well. If I type in "12-16", excel changes it to "16-Dec".

Is there a way to turn this "nannying" off?

tanstaafl.