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Excel dates are now separated by comma instead of slash; how do I get the slashes back?

Anonymous
2017-10-29T05:38:40+00:00

After upgrading to Windows 10 (I believe) using MS Office 2015; all the dates in my excel spreadsheets are now separated by commas.

i.e. 15th of August used to look like 15/08/2017 and is now 15,08,2017

I have changed the formatting in Control Panel and my dates appear with slashes perfectly fine everywhere else on my laptop except for MS Excel.

This is so annoying!

s

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Andreas Killer 144K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2017-10-29T12:03:39+00:00

    Application.International(xlDateSeparator)                 ,

    Here's the issue.

    Do as follows:

    Compare / Check the Language settings the control panel (your keyboard layout should be "English, US"):

    Click "Change date, time, or number formats":

    Click "Additional settings..."

    Click the Reset button.

    Click Ok on all window

    Reboot

    Open Excel and check the behavior

    Problem solved?

    Andreas.

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-10-29T19:49:02+00:00

    Problem solved?

    Andreas.

    Yes, problem solved. I thought it may be the Australian English setting but it came down to 'match windows display language' I believe.

    I googled extensively to solve this and every other recommended solution didn't fix it.

    Now, to ask the question; why wouldn't this work after I selected English (Aus) or English (USA) for that matter, rather than 'match Windows display language'?  I suspect many others would also have this problem.

    I'm going to install Win 10 properly soon, I piggybacked it onto Win 8.1 and I suspect it's responsible for this as well as taking up space on my hard drive.  I'll have to come revisit this again if the same problem occurs.

    Thank you so much Andreas

    s

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  2. Andreas Killer 144K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2017-10-30T08:06:04+00:00

    Now, to ask the question; why wouldn't this work after I selected English (Aus) or English (USA) for that matter, rather than 'match Windows display language'?  I suspect many others would also have this problem.

    Sorry, I can't answer this.

    If you view all the possible settings available in Windows you can see that there is no place to change the date separator directly.

    This is due to the fact that the date formats can be very different even in one country.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

    To format a date correctly is not easy, especially if you deal with different languages.

    Andreas.

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