On 5/5/2018 8:19 PM, GS wrote:
....

So then, when dates are imported/pasted into cells, Excel reads the
DateSerial and renders that in the system format. Now since the numeric
display has been ambiguous to many since Vista, my solution has been to
use textual formatting instead. (That's all I'm saying) So when I design
spreadsheets I deliberately use textual date formats so there's no
ambiguity (as expressed by the OP in this thread) as to what the date is!

It appears that in current versions you can't import two files with
conflicting definitions? I wasn't aware of that; hadn't really tested
presumed that if one had dates provided in a given format you could read
them as the system that generated them defined them.

_Way_ back, worked with a data-acq system that used dd\mm\yyyy and I
surely don't recall having an issue back then (this, of course, was in
DOS/Win 3 era thru _maybe_ W95).

I just tried to enter as a string '5/5/2000' into two cells and format
it as mm/dd/yyyy in one and dd/mm/yyyy in the other and couldn't
succeed; the OS setting as you say interferes and corrupts the one; MS
thinks they know better than the user it appears.

I don't recall that being the case in the days of that old system...or
am I just getting that senile; can't believe I wouldn't recall having to
have had to do a conversion outside for the end users (albeit I was
using Matlab for the work I did which reads the data and believes the
user's intention is what is to be, not what it thinks it _should_ be).

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