Hi,

My international application is trying to create a sheet with date values,
but I am not sure how to format the dates before sending them to Excel. I
initially tried the machine format, but after a lot of attempts it seems
that on my machine Excel only accepts dates in US (mm/dd/yy) format, even if
I set the user locale, default user locale, date format, and office default
language to English (UK), which implies a dd/mm/yy format.

The question arises whether this will hold true in other installations as
well. I've seen two comments in Microsoft literature about this: the first
mentions Excel uses the lcid parameter passed in the IDispatch Invoke call.
However, I do not use IDispatch but rather import the type library and use
the dual interface directly. I'm not sure it is relevant to my problem, as
the purpose behind the lcid parameter is to select the type library to use,
but in any case I don't go through IDispatch.

The other comment was related to .NET development for Excel 2003. They
mention that the thread culture must match one of the MUIs installed on the
system. I am not sure whether this applies to earlier versions, replacing
culture with locale; I'm also not sure this applies in this situation, as I
cannot imagine I have to install a language pack in order to support
European-style dates.

Does anyone have experience with this matter? Any help would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,
Eran