On 5/5/2018 8:19 PM, GS wrote:
...

So then, when dates are imported/pasted into cells, Excel reads the
DateSerial and renders that in the system format. Now since the numeric
display has been ambiguous to many since Vista, my solution has been to use
textual formatting instead. (That's all I'm saying) So when I design
spreadsheets I deliberately use textual date formats so there's no
ambiguity (as expressed by the OP in this thread) as to what the date is!

It appears that in current versions you can't import two files with
conflicting definitions? I wasn't aware of that; hadn't really tested
presumed that if one had dates provided in a given format you could read them
as the system that generated them defined them.

_Way_ back, worked with a data-acq system that used dd\mm\yyyy and I surely
don't recall having an issue back then (this, of course, was in DOS/Win 3 era
thru _maybe_ W95).

I just tried to enter as a string '5/5/2000' into two cells and format it as
mm/dd/yyyy in one and dd/mm/yyyy in the other and couldn't succeed; the OS
setting as you say interferes and corrupts the one; MS thinks they know
better than the user it appears.

I don't recall that being the case in the days of that old system...or am I
just getting that senile; can't believe I wouldn't recall having to have had
to do a conversion outside for the end users (albeit I was using Matlab for
the work I did which reads the data and believes the user's intention is what
is to be, not what it thinks it _should_ be).

Anything we did pre-Vista is no longer valid in terms of numeric (05/05/2018)
input. It's not that Excel thinks it knows better, but rather that it reads
DateSerial values rather than display values when it comes to dates.

Where the problem lies for users is in [not] changing the way they enter dates
in terms of d/m or m/d, depending on which OS they're working in. I was forced
to figure this out after buying my 1st Win7 machine while still using my XP
unit as my main machine.

So docs done on pre-Vista systems would still show correct dates when opened in
the later OSs because regardless of how the system format displays, the
DateSerial dictates the actual date value!

--
Garry

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