MacOS – How to fix Excel 2008 Date Formats in Mavericks

macosms office

I have Excel 2008 installed on my Mac, which I recently upgraded to Mavericks, migrating all my settings across.

Previously (on Mountain Lion) when I entered a date like 11/12 this was interpreted as 11 December, but now Excel insists on interpreting this in American format.

All my existing data (some going back years, originally entered in Windows) displays correctly as I have entered a custom Format ddd dd/mm/yy, but displays incorrectly in the formula bar.

As far as I can tell, my system settings are correct for Australia – they were migrated across, and I have since checked. Numbers seems to have no problem with dates.

Best Answer

After some searching and trial-and-error, I have identified that the issue relates to the absence of a key file: com.apple.HIToolbox.plist, which for some reason is not created when setting up a new User account (and may not be copied across if importing from another computer). Luckily this file is created when opening the Guest account, which can then be copied across to all required User accounts.

Here is a detailed summary of the procedure I eventually used to fix this date format issue:

  1. Create and open a Guest Account (if not already enabled, go to Users & Group Preferences)
  2. Go to the Library folder (it’s a hidden folder, so to find it, use Finder to go to the home folder, then select from the menu ‘Go:Go to Folder’ and type in ‘Library’)
  3. Go to the Preferences folder
  4. Make a local copy of the file: com.apple.HIToolbox.plist (e.g. onto an SD card, or external/cloud drive)
  5. Now open your desired User account
  6. Go to your Library folder (again it will be hidden, so find it as above)
  7. Go to the Preferences folder
  8. Copy the file: com.apple.HIToolbox.plist (from local storage) into this folder
  9. Quit Excel and then log out of your user account, and then log back in
  10. Next time Excel starts, UK date format will be correct!

(Source: http://www.yellowsbest.com/solved-uk...excelmac-2008/)

Related Question