There seems to be a major bug in Excel 2007 vis-a-vis Excel 2003 with respect
to how date formats are handled. I frequently open and edit dbf files (dBase
III) in Excel and version 2007 has a problem in handling dates in such files.

Here's my setup : Regional Settings : English (US) and Short Date Format:
dd-MMM-yy

The dbf files have a date format of dd/MM/yyyy ( i.e. UK format)

When I used to open these files in Excel 2003, the date format shown would
be identical to that in the dbf files (dd-MM-yy). Now with Excel 2007, some
dates appear as MM-dd-yy (format changed to US) and others appear as a string
of numbers with an error comment showing that these are numbers formatted as
text. After a lot of
trial and error, it appears to me that those dates where both the day and
the month is less than or equal to 12 appear as MM-dd-yy and in all other
cases they appear as numbers formatted as text. It appears that Excel 2007 is
unable to resolve the date format if either the day or the month is greater
than 12.

For example, a date in my dbf file listed as 05/06/1984 appears as 06-05-84
while a date of 31/01/1986 appears as a text value of 19860131 and 15/08/1985
appears as a text value of 19850815.

I cannot understand why this is happening with Excel 2007 since Excel 2003
was able to import the data from the dbf files without any problems and I
have made no changes in my Regional Settings.

The only workaround I have found for this problem is to do a Text-to-Column
operation on the date columns. This is an unnecesssary extra operation which
was not required in Excel 2003.

Microsoft, please fix this problem