International Date Format

[Jim]

I have a user who is on Windows 2000 and Office XP
Professional. She is running some essential older
software made in the mid to late 90's by a very microsoft-
centric organization. She works in Ireland and uses
d/m/yyyy type formats for her short and long dates in
Regional Settings. When she exports a list from this
older software that contains dates formatted d/m/yyyy (or
some variation of this - dd/mm/yyyy) into Excel 2002, the
dates look all right in the edit window at the top of the
program but are misinterpreted within the worksheet as
m/d/yyyy by Excel. Thus some appear normally formatted
and right justified while others (the ones with a first
number higher than 12) appear left justified and not
formatted properly.
What I am uncertain about is whether this is a bug in
Excel or some situation generated by the older Visual
Basic software that makes the call to Excel in some now
outdated way.
Anyone able to help me on this one?

Thanks in advance.
Jim

 

[Dave Peterson]

If she renames the file that she imports into excel to .txt (I'm guessing it's
currently .csv), then she'll have a lot more control over each of the fields.

One of the steps in the Data|Import wizard is used to specify the field types.
Tell her to use dmy.

 

[Jim]

This does not involve a file but happens on the fly by
the older application making a call to Excel and sending
the data by DDE or some other method behind the scenes,
automatically populating the worksheet.

 

[Dave Peterson]

Untested:

Maybe you could fiddle with her windows regional settings to make them match the
data. (If it works, change them, let her do her stuff, and change them back.
You don't want to screw up other things.)

Windows|Settings|control panel|Regional settings applet|Date Tab

 

[Jim]

Well that is basically how we handle it now, but I was
looking for something that would point to either
something that has changed in Excel 2002 since Excel
95/97 that when called from Visual Basic would now behave
differently regarding dates, or something wrong with how
Excel 2002 handles date formatting. Just fishing I guess.

Thanks
Jim

-----Original Message-----
Untested:

Maybe you could fiddle with her windows regional

settings to make them match the