Why don't you post your question on the Oracle site.

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=583

I haven't herd of any problems with excel that may cause this problem.

"Beth" wrote:

Hello,

Whenever I try to do a query on my Oracle dababase via Microsoft Query I am
getting a "Syntax error in date" error message when entering criteria for
date fields.

This has only started happening last week and is effecting every query with
a date, existing and new.

Many thanks for your help