Forum Discussion
Date format in excel
Hi, i bought Office 365, before I used Office 2013, I have some files with maros that have to read Dates, the problem is tha in Office 2013 the date format is dd/mm/aaaa and in the Office 365 the date format is mm/dd/aaaa. In this case when I use a function like Now() the date format is mm/dd/aaaa and it doesn't allow me to compare tow dates.
How I can configure the date format in excell? no in a cell of excel, in excel in general.
Thanks!
The default date format in Excel depends on your system date format.
However, Excel stores dates as numbers, and displays these numbers according to the number format of the cells.
So for example, if a cell contains the 5th of April 2024, someone in the USA would probably see 4/5/24 or 4/5/2024. If the workbook would be opened by someone in Germany, they would see 05.04.2024 since they use dd.mm.yyyy as default date format. And I would see 2024-04-05, since I uses ISO date format yyyy-mm-dd. But the underlying value would be exactly the same.
So you should be able to compare dates, regardless of the way they have been formatted.
Warning: this does not hold for text values that look like dates. Excel treats text values as different from dates, even if those text values look like dates.
A telltale difference is that dates are right-aligned by default, while text values are left-aligned by default.
If you are not resident in the US or Liberia (the fact that you abbreviate year to 'aaaa' suggests you are not), I suggest you reset your computer localisation settings.
