Microsoft excel

Excel is displaying (for example) the text 1-2 as 2-Jan; when I try and format as text it changes it to the number 40545. Any way to get back to the original 1-2? It's an issue as I have 285,000 lines, each with a similar cell.

Excel stores dates as serial numbers and uses functions to convert them back to text. You are looking at the serial number. The link below explains how to use the functions to convert between serial numbers and text for dates.

http://www.advanced-excel.com/date_functions.html

use a ' as the first character of the text information