Excel 2003 Mis-Translates Imported DD/MM/YYYY Dates

[Guest]

How come Excel 2003 mis-translates all imported dates withint the 1st to 12th
of each month, even though I have correctly set my Regional Settings ?

I'm really sick of having to pick my way throught sometimes 100 lines of
imported accounting ledger reports, to manually re-type each such date into
the correct date formatt - DD/MM/YYYY.

Or don't its programmers realize that people actually live outside the U.S.
???
Haven't they heard of the British date format ?

Yep - us Loyalists are still here !

 

[Ron Rosenfeld]

How come Excel 2003 mis-translates all imported dates withint the 1st to 12th
of each month, even though I have correctly set my Regional Settings ?

I'm really sick of having to pick my way throught sometimes 100 lines of
imported accounting ledger reports, to manually re-type each such date into
the correct date formatt - DD/MM/YYYY.

Or don't its programmers realize that people actually live outside the U.S.
???
Haven't they heard of the British date format ?

Yep - us Loyalists are still here !

Other than ranting, you don't really supply much data to allow someone to help.

Usually the reason for mistranslation, regardless of where you live, has to do
with either incorrect settings in the Data/Text-to-Columns wizard; differences
in format between the data being imported and your regional settings; being
unaware that some of your imported data contains TEXT and not numeric values;
incorrectly formatting the input columns, and so forth.

If you really want help, as opposed to just wanting to complain about the
results of your colonial policies, I would suggest passing along some more
information, such as examples of the data being imported; the method you are
using for data importation; examples of correctly and incorrectly imported data
and the results of each; results of testing the imported data (both the
correctly and incorrectly converted) to see if it is text or not (i.e.
=ISTEXT(cell_ref))

I will guess that the data that you think is DATE data, is really TEXT data.
That is a problem that affects all; not just Loyalists. And it is correctable.


--ron

 

[Dave Peterson]

How are you opening your file and what's the name of that file?

If you name your file *.txt, you'll see the text import wizard open up and you
can specify the format of each field--including dmy for that date field.

 

[Bruno Vermeersch]

If you really want the CORRECT date format, why not using the International
Standard (ISO8601) : YYYY-MM-DD
And this can be done by Format>Custom

Bruno