Excel reverts to US date format.

I have done a good bit of searching on this group and it looks like a
lot of people are suffering from this issue, but there doesn't seem to
be an answer.

I am helping out a user with a problem with Excel 2004 for Mac running
on OSX 10.3.9.
The problem is Excel keeps changing the date format in his spreadsheets
from dd/mm/yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy.

We are based in New Zealand, and this appears to be part of the
problem. OSX does not recognise the New Zealand format region in
non-unicode applications (which I am assuming includes Excel) and
reverts to the previous compatible region, which as the US is the
default setting is usually the US.
The answer to this problem is to set the region to Australia, which is
compatible, and this worked... for about a week. Excel was working
perfectly, recognising the dd/mm/yyyy formatting, we thought we had the
problem solved.

Now all of a sudden Excel seems to have reverted all of his dates to
the mm/dd/yyyy. He had created a custom format of dd/mm/yyyy. Now all
of the cells that used this format have changed to mm/dd/yyyy. We can
no longer use the custom format as it keeps changing.
OSX is still using the Australian region, nothing has changed there.

So it seems to be a combination of bugs. One in OSX which doesn't like
the NZ date format, and one in Excel which has changed the actual cell
date format inside his spreadsheets.

I have been in discussion with the other IT staff inside or
organisation, and a handful have gotten back to me saying they have
exactly the same problem, but no one has an answer.

Thanks for your time. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

In article <1133737587.720608.161360.DeleteThis@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"justin.young@otago.ac.nz" <justinbyoung.DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote:

> So it seems to be a combination of bugs. One in OSX which doesn't like
> the NZ date format, and one in Excel which has changed the actual cell
> date format inside his spreadsheets.
>
> I have been in discussion with the other IT staff inside or
> organisation, and a handful have gotten back to me saying they have
> exactly the same problem, but no one has an answer.
>
> Thanks for your time. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Don't know about the MacOS bug, but since XL picks up date format from
the System, it's not surprising that this would cause problems in XL.

OTOH, you shouldn't be losing custom formats. Note that formats are
workbook-specific rather than application-specific - you have to set
them for each workbook. Are you actually losing them in workbooks in
which the custom format was set?

If you want all *new* workbooks to have the custom format, change your
default template. If you don't already have one (i.e., XL generates new
workbooks from its internal settings), open a fresh workbook, set the
format, along with any other settings (i.e, number of sheets, view type,
colors, etc) and save it in your

HD:Applications:Microsoft Office 2004:Office:Startup:Excel

folder *as a template* named "Workbook" (no quotes, no extension). XL
will then make all new workbooks from that template.