Hi Oisin

using your example (in Australia where we have the same default date format
as you) i had 1/11/04 10:00:00 appear in my cell. i'm using excel 2003
running on windows xp home.

The only date settings i ever played with were under control panel /
regional settings ...

sorry i can't be more helpful, but it's working for me.

Cheers
JulieD

"Oisin O'Reilly" wrote in message
om...
Hi,
We have an application (Excel Add-in) that writes dates to Excel
according to the current Short Date format. What I've found in Excel
2003 (and not previous versions, although I haven't tried Excel XP) is
that "ambiguous" dates, i.e. 01/11/04 are defaulting to appearing in
US mm/dd/yy format and not the UK format. I can boil the problem down
to the following - I don't have to write a line of VBA to demonstrate
this:

* Format a cell as custom format dd/mm/yy hh:mm:ss
* Type in "1/11/04 10:00:00" - i.e. 1st November
* Appearing on the cell is 11/1/04 10:00:00

By putting a quote in front of the value in my application I can force
the dates to appear correctly - but this takes away from the
flexibility of my application.

Note Regional settings are ALL UK/Ireland. This has been checked and
double checked.

Is there some hidden setting in Excel 2003 that needs to change so
that it recognises the formatting imposed on it? I read on someones
post that VBA and Excel were writting by different groups. I'll need
some convincing that this is not a bug, but more importantly what can
I do about this (and tell my customers, because they probably won't
believe me when I say this is an Excel bug that I can't work around).

Suggestions very welcome!
thanks Oisin