Excel, Dates, and Discretization

[MarcoGV]

I recently ran into a problem that I do not know how to solve in a simple way.  It turns out that Excel automatically turns an entry like 5 - 10 into a date; in this case, May 10.  (I am in the U.S.)  (See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/stop-automatically-changing-numbers-to-dates-452bd2db-cc96-47d1-81e4-72cec11c4ed8)  After discretization of a data set where one of the intervals is 5 - 10, the .cvs file built by Hugin has May 10 entries wherever 5 -10 should be.  Attempts to convert May 10 to 5 - 10 by formatting cells fail, because 5 - 10 is turned into a number representing the number of days from the "beginning of time," and trying to convert that number back to 5 - 10 results in May 10 again.  Does anyone have any suggestions to solve this problem?