Forum Discussion
Default Date Format refuses to use system regional settings
There are lots of forum questions about date format - this might be answered somewhere, but it's too deep to find the answer.
I have Excel from Microsoft 365, installed on my Windows 10 computer. Excel says it's version 2506. I have the regional settings on my computer set to US:
Notice the date formats. When I open a new workbook in Excel, and type a date, if I don't include the year, it immediately converts it to a European format. I type 7/15, and it converts it 15-Jul:
How do I correct this behavior? I typed it the way I want it. My system is set up to use MM/DD. But I have to change the column format to MM/DD to get Excel to use that.
3 Replies
As far as I know, dd-mmm and dd-mmm-yy are built-in formats regardless of your regional settings, and Excel will often use them if you enter a date in a cell that does not already have a date format.
If you want dates to display as m/d or mm/dd, you should format the cell(s) that way, either before or after entering the date.
So, any idea how I file a bug report? Because that's as clear a bug as I've ever seen. User uses standard format for their region, Microsoft claims the application uses the OS regionalization, the application clearly recognizes that it's a date, but the application ignores the user and the regionalization and reformats the user's input into an unchangeable default date format the user didn't want. If I typed 15, and Excel turned it into "0x0f" by default, surely we'd all agree that's actually a bug?
You can report it from within Excel: on the Help tab of the ribbon, click Feedback, then click 'Report a problem'.
I suspect that Microsoft will not consider this to be a bug, though.
