Win 7 (and others?) update quirk affecting Excel

[Ausman]

Hi all,

just a heads up to something I discovered today.  I still am on Win 7 for my main computer system.  I think that a recent Win update upset my date settings severely.

I discovered that date entries into Excel were not going in properly.  With different number combinations it was always displaying a mishmash of American or Australian date method, with seemingly random change of day/date position.  (USA 3rd of November is 11/03/2016  and Aus is 03/11/2016)  No matter what I did with cell formats etc the problem would not go away.  Given that I use Excel a fair bit in my work and date sorting/entry is important, this was an issue and lead to more hair removal.

I eventually discovered that many of my locale settings had been changed to USA standard, but not in every relevant area of the registry.  I had to go through Region & Language, change everything away from correct, apply and close, and then do it correctly and apply again etc.  I haven't installed or altered anything else on this puter apart from some updates coming through, so I'm blaming Msoft.  If you're in the States you probably won't be affected, but if you are elsewhere and weird things start happening in this area, check it out.

It was initially very perplexing, and my eventual registry check at  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International  sShortDate showed up the discrepancy, and I went from there.  I think that because of the mismatches in the registry, the poor old system was confused and didn't know what to do. 

Are you there, HAL?  I enjoy working with Humans, Dave!  (Especially when I send you crazy!!!)

cheers,

Aus