Excel Date Formatting

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hayden Mead
  • Start date Start date
H

Hayden Mead

Hi,

In Excel the regional settings are set to short date
format. However, if you try and format cells individually
with a date, the date changes, but when the spreadsheet is
closed and the reopened the formatting reverts to the
short date format! We are using Excel 2000 with sp3 on XP
(If thats any help!) If anyone has any ideas why this is
occuring i'd love to know!

Cheers,

Hayden
 
Are you saying that the same person on the same pc opens the file and the date
format has changed?

If it's another user (or another pc), then it could be the way excel picks up
the date format if it matches the regional settings (short or long) format.

I'm not sure if this note is in xl2k, but it's in xl2002. (But I think xl2k
works the same way.)

If I format a cell as date (Format|Cells|Number Tab|Date category), I get this
note at the bottom of the dialog:

Date formats display date and time serial numbers as date values. Except for
items that have an asterisk (*), applied formats do not switch date orders with
the operating system.

And one of the entries with an asterisk is the short date format.

To me this means if you choose the short date format that is displayed by excel,
it's going to go off to the windows regional settings to find out what windows
wants you to use.

My short date is set to show mm/dd/yyyy (4 digit year). I custom format my
dates as mm/dd/yyyy and share my workbook with someone who has a short date of
m/d/yy, they see m/d/yy--not mm/dd/yyyy.

So my followup questions are:
What is your short date format in regional settings?
What is the date format you use in excel?

====
If it's the same user on the same pc, then this response was way off point. I
don't have a guess for that.
 
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