Spence
The file format in XL2007 is completely changed so when they are converted the whole file is stripped and rebuilt and the new format is an xml text format internally.
This means that 'numbers' like 01-02 will be seen as dates during this conversion and will likely become 1-Feb in Europe, or 2-Jan in the US.
You may be able to stop this by pre-formatting these 'date looking' cells as text before converting the file.
Regards
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP, Excel
Southampton, UK