Joel,

You didn't quote the relevant parts of the message to which you replied, but
in reply to your:

" Now finally a good question. A US member of the USMC trying to
enter a date in International standard (Day/Month/Year). Now that
is a problem. Excel has different versions for different countries.
The US version won't recognize the International dates, and the
Internation version of Excel won't recogmize the US dates.

the US version will only recognize an input in US format of
month/day/year, but will automaticaly convert to International
standard is you change the format of the cell(s)."

.... , I said:
"The thing which determines how Excel interprets dates is not "different
versions for different countries". It's determined by the Windows Regional
Options, set through Control Panel."

You were talking not about how the number is *displayed*, but how it is
*entered*.

The cell formatting governs the *display*, and changing the format will not
change the underlying number if a date has been wrongly interpreted at the
time of entry.
The Windows Regional Settings governs the interpretation of numbers that are
*entered".

You are quite corrrect that it is safer to use an unambiguous format.
The ISO 8601 standard format is 2009-10-18
--
David Biddulph

joel wrote:
I don't think yhou want to have somebody from the US change there
regional setting just to send a report to somebody who is using
international standards. The person from the US should just reformat
the date cells in a custom format. the other sloution is just use the
international date system spelling out the month so nobody gets
confused.

The International standard date format is

11 November 2009