Forum Discussion

Copper Contributor

Nov 16, 2017

Changing default dates on Excel for Mac

Hi, I have a very annoying issue with Excel for Mac with the date formatting being unable to be switched to dd/mm/yyyy. I run Excel 16.8 on macOS 10.13.1. The current default date format is t...

Excel on Mac

office 365

SeS

Copper Contributor

Nov 16, 2024

It seems that Microsoft/Office solely uses the AppleLocale to configure the default behavior and does not consider any individually configured formats defined in your Mac's system preferences.

This fix worked for me:

Open terminal and check your current AppleLocale by:

defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleLocale

Set a locale that uses your desired formats (in my case de_DE):

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleLocale de_DE

After restarting Excel, dates appear as expected.