Regarding date problem and times gone by

Recently had a large project with dates in the 1800s.

This seems to be a problem with many spreadsheets that auto change anything that looks like a date. Can I stop this from happening.

The genealogy project consisted of many spreadsheets that I received to merge and all had dates in the format of “16Apr1862” (no spaces which I assume was an attept to stop this very problem).

I could not open these in LibreOffice without this auto changing the dates to a numerical on opening. I did manually change the date format but would like to stop any autochanging happening at all.

So is there any way to stop the automatic changing function and to ensure there is absolutely no tampering of the received data.

In which format did you receive the data? If it’s a CSV then it’s quite easy to mark each column that you don’t want to be touched/converted to be imported as TEXT.