The first thing to remember is that the formatting of a cell does not affect
its contents. The contents stay the same regardless of the formatting.

Your basic problem is that the Dutch entry is not being recognized as a
date. It is therefore being treated as text. It's got nothing to do with the
format.

I suspect the easiest thing you can do is to use month numbers rather than
month names. For example, enter 12/10/2008 rather than 12/Oct/2008. And in
your macro, look for month 10 rather than month Oct.

But the bottom line is, make sure your entries are being recognized as a
date, not as text. The easiest way to determine the difference is that dates
can be reformatted, text cannot.

Regards,
Fred.

"Libby" wrote in message
...
Hello,

I have on a spreadsheet a column for dates. The dates are entered in the
format dd/mmm/yyyy and then the cell formatting changes them to mmm-yy.

This works fine for all UK users, but it all goes pear shaped when people
abroad add dates. In this case the format of the cell is overridden with
another format and foreign spelling.
For example, if I entered 12/oct/2008 in the UK, the cell would display
Oct-08. However when a Dutch person does it for the same date 12-Okt-2008
is
displayed.

Not only is the formatting wrong, but the word Okt instead of Oct is
present. I have a macro which used the "Oct" part to count the number of
entries per month and this issue is messing it up.

Is there any way to force the dates into UK format?

Thanks in advance