Excel formatting things like "2-2" as date, then when reformatting to text it inserts a random number

We have a user exporting information from a software to an excel sheet. One of the columns contains numbers like "2-2" "4-3" and so on. These are not dates, they are election precincts. They need to stay as they are.

When exported into excel, they are automatically converted into a date format. This wouldn't be a huge issue if I could reformat them into text properly.

If I try to change the format to text, or number, or anything else, it inserts seemingly random numbers. So it takes "2-2" and turns it into "02/02/2026" and then when formatting that as text, turns it into something like "46116"

Can I disable automatic formatting somehow? Or at least just have a way to format it back to it's properly original content?

Edit: We cannot type this information. Adding an apostrophe isn't a viable option because it's an exported dataset of thousands of entries.