Applogies for the late reply have been busy. Doing some more research on this
i found an article "Creating Office solutions for Use in Multiple
Countries/Regions".

Basicaly i can't get the information from my work's computer to my home one
and i can't get the firewall team to let me out to these forums. Howver the
data in the CSV file (csv contains no formatting) is written in an english
style ie the text is 04/05/2005. This translates to the 4th of may 2005 due
to the fact the machine is in england so am I and I use UK style formatting
and so do the customers i work with.

The problem appears to be that excel 2003 is hard coded to read this text
string as US format, despite whatever language settings you have on your
machine), meaning when ever i get to the 13th of the month it gets confused
and just imports it as text.

This means i then have a sheet saying the 4th of jan to december untill i
get to the 13th of april at which point it imports it as text and all is well.

The solutions as far as i can see it is to force excel to read the date
properly (only way i can think of doing this at the current time is to save
the csv as a worksheet import the data then deleate the worksheet) . Or to
get excel to imort all the dates as text. I can't make any changes to the csv
itself so changing the formatting in that isn't an option.

Hope this clarafies things a bit