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Forum Discussion
Cannot Change Excel online date format
Hi, I live in Australia and I need to change the date format in Excel to the proper format. It currently displays as mm/dd/yyyy. I've already checked the date format of my Dropbox account and it ...
@PAUL: You can change the Excel date display format but the Excel date input format is determined by the regional settings of the environment Excel is running in (Web/Windows/Mac/Mobile).
If you want to display date cells correctly you can use the date detection in this sheet:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4737890/RegionalSettings.xlsxand then use the formula "=TEXT([YourDateCellReference],C8)" to format date cells in Excel.
With English (Australian) settings on Windows the formula "=TEXT(38000,C8)" shows "14/02/2004".
The date format problem is one of the weaknesses of Excel. If you want to create internationalized worksheets that work in every country you have to detect the local regional settings and internationalize all formatting, input parsing and formula generating formulas.
@PAUL: You can change the Excel date display format but the Excel date input format is determined by the regional settings of the environment Excel is running in (Web/Windows/Mac/Mobile).
If you want to display date cells correctly you can use the date detection in this sheet:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4737890/RegionalSettings.xlsx
and then use the formula "=TEXT([YourDateCellReference],C8)" to format date cells in Excel.
With English (Australian) settings on Windows the formula "=TEXT(38000,C8)" shows "14/02/2004".
The date format problem is one of the weaknesses of Excel. If you want to create internationalized worksheets that work in every country you have to detect the local regional settings and internationalize all formatting, input parsing and formula generating formulas.
This shouldnt be so complicated. How is the average excel user supposed to be able to do this? Without the correct date format, this makes managing date related spreadsheets on dropbox cumbersome and essentially useless.
Will a simple resolution to this ever be achieved?
