I've solved the problem. Just needed to add English (United States) format
to my regional settings. I've now got the language bar to appear on my
taskbar, though I do not need to change settings now as Excel is
automatically recognising the US format.

"Jim Rech" wrote:

I flipped to UK settings and got exactly your issue with a text file in US
format when manually opening the file. But with a macro it came in fine.

Workbooks.OpenText Filename:="c:\datetime.txt", DataType:=xlDelimited,
Tab:=True

This is because, when a macro is running, Excel is in 'US settings mode'
despite your local settings. So it reads the US format file correctly.

--
Jim
"Calmack" wrote in message
...
|I am in the UK and I am trying to import a tab-delimited text file which
| contains all dates in US date-time format, eg 03/14/2008 9:12:25 AM. I
| import the file into Excel and it goes through the wizard. I set the date
| field to MDY, but when I press Finish the dates appear either as a UK date
| (when both month and day are less than/equal 12) or as text (when it
cannot
| convert). I have tried it by editing the text file and separating date
and
| time with tabs before importing and that works. But I don't want to have
to
| do editing like that.