I am not privy to the inner workings of XL so the below is my interpretation
of what I get:

When presented with a "part date" like 12/96 XL tries to interpreit it into
a whole date by trying to add the current year. 12/96/2007 is obviously not
a real date so XL knows tries to make the date by adding day number 1 to
give 1/12/1996

For ambiguous dates like your 12/06 which *could* be 1/12/1906, 1/12/2006,
or 12/6/2007 XL goes through it procedure of adding the current year then a
day until is finds a acceptable date and the first one that it comes across
is 12/06/2007.

The only answer to ambiguous dates is to make them specific so that there is
no doubt what it was that you intended and that needs yyy or VBA

--
HTH

Sandy
In Perth, the ancient capital of Scotland
and the crowning place of kings


Replace @mailinator.com with @tiscali.co.uk


"dabarr" wrote in message
...
The cell format has be set as a Custom format mm/yy.

When entering dates into cells as mm/yy Excel interprets 12/96 as 01/12/96
(dd/mm/yy English format) BUT if you enter 12/06 it enterprets it as
12/06/07
and displays it as 06/07. IE Excel is interpreting 12/06 as dd/mm and
defaulting the current year.

Is there any way of getting excel to accept post 1999 years entered as yy?

This is part of an electronic questionnaire so the data entry has to be
completely idiot proof. I don't want to use yyyy or a format that needs
the
days. Nor do I want to use macros or dummy columns if I can help it.

Any thoughts most welcome!