I found the best solution is to quote everything from a tsv or csv file, in case someone requests a dataset in xlsx format. but whenever I get an xlsx file, I just learnt to always check for dates, it is sometimes possible to get around this if there are other identifiers or genomic coordinates, but some gene names will be converted to the same date, which leaves it impossible to backtrack the original genename.
Unfortunately it does not look like something to be solved:
QUOTE: "Microsoft Excel is preprogrammed to make it easier to enter dates. For example, 12/2 changes to 2-Dec. This is very frustrating when you enter something that you don't want changed to a date. Unfortunately there is no way to turn this off. But there are ways to get around it."
Source: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/stop-automatically-...