format a cell to use mo/date with no year:,displays 1900?

I'M TRYING TO FORMAT A CELL IN EXCEL WITH JUST THE MONTH/DATE 3/14 0R12/1.
THIS DISPLAYS OK ON THE SHEET BUT WHEN I TRY TO EDIT THE INFO THE YEAR 1900
IS ALSO DISPLAYED IN THE EDIT AREA?? ALSO WHEN I USE THE INFO IN CONJUNCTION
WITH THE MERGE WIZARD IN WORD THE 1900 IS DISPLAYED WITH THE DATES. I TRIED
GOING TO TEXT USING 3/14 BY HIGHLIGHTING TEXT IN UNDER THE NUMBER TAB IN THE
DATA FORMAT COMMAND BUT THAT JUST REMOVES THE /. ANY SUGGESTIONS?

You will have to decide what to do but the reason you get this is simple but not often understood.
Excel uses a number for date and time the part to the left of the decimal point is the number of days from the 1st Jan 1900; and the part to the right of the decimal point is a fraction of 35 hours which gives a time. Formatting a cell to display only a day and month (or just a year, or hust a time etc) does not mean you have somehow got rid of the rest of the date and time.

you can choose to use a text field but then you will have other problems particularly if you want to sort a column of dates.

regards

taking your example above 3/14/1900 try this
=Text(A1,"mmmm,dd")
this will give you March, 14
=Text (A1,"mm,dd")
this will give you 03,14

I hope this will help.