hi
preceed your entry with an apostrophe ie '+ Dog.
you seem to be caught in up in lotus formulas. lotus formulas (not all) were
proceeded with the plus sign and excel still has the lotus conversion built
into it so that whenever it sees anything starting with a plus sign, it wants
to convert it to a formula. by preceeding the entry with an apostophe, you
would be telling excel ....."this is text, not a formula". this built in
conversion thing goes back to when excel first came out and copied lotus in
almost everything even down to the date bug that lotus had.
oh well.....
regards
FSt1