Open Office Calc - Stop date autoformatting

Question

When I paste raw data into calc some of it converts to a date automatically (it is not date data, it simply contains a hyphen). This data is then lost because if i turn it back into text I get an unrelated value

Answer 1

I believe all spreadsheets (OO Calc, LibreOffice Calc, Excel, ...) accept a single quote - just left of the return key on my keyboard - as "the text qualifier".

In practice this means that if you begin any entry in a cell with a single quote then the remainder of your typing will be kept as is - no evaluation at all.

... as in ' 012345 for an example, which would lose the leading zero and space if typed without the quote.
Now also note that this is an enforced "TEXT" data type, it cannot be changed without actually removing the quote.