Strings converted to dates by Excel

I am writing to Excel a cell array of strings. Windows 7, MS Office 2010. Some of these strings look like they are dates, though in reality they have nothing to do with a date. When I use xlswrite, these string are converted to dates. So, if my string looks like 'Mar-05', corresponding cell in Excell contains 3/5/2016. Its look is defined by a custom Excel format (mm-dd). What I want is, of course, that my data is not altered in any way and if I write a string 'Mar-05' - that's the content of Excel cell I want to have. No, I cannot really avoid using strings like that, they are not under my control. Is there any way to tell the Excel not to be that smart? Any ideas will be appreciated.

Thank you, N. Derzhi

[jgg]

Is it feasible to

• Append " " delimiters to your string cells? So Mar-05 becomes "Mar-05"
• Write to a .csv instead?