Preventing Excel from changing a text fe

I currently am having difficulty with Excel changing a feild to a date feild when using the search and replace function. The data in the feild is a location in our warehouse with is in the format of 00-2-01. When I go in to search and replace these feilds excel changes then to a date feild automatically. I have tried to set the format of the entire document to text and also the cells themselves to text feilds with no luck. I have looked in the options panel also to see if I could turn this function off but have had no luck. Any help on this would be appreciated.