Excel add-in changes text.

[John 27182]

Here is an interesting bug that we're having.

In our contributor model we have an item which has a text formatting. We write a date inside it (e.g. "01/08/2009"). So on the website we see that text. However when you look at the same model in the excel add-in the text changes into "08/01/2009". If we put an initial text of "17/06/2011" in, the text isn't changed.

It seems like Cognos, when creating the excel contributor workbook, assumed that the text in the website model was in American formatted date (i.e. mm/dd/yyyy), and proceeds to convert it into British format (i.e. dd/mm/yyyy).

Has anyone encountered this before?

John.

[ericlfg]

Right off, without doing any testing on my own to see what the behavior is..  is it possible Excel is overriding the format with it's default?  (not knowing off hand what the excel default is)

[John 27182]

Hi Ericlfg,

The issue is with the default settings. Normally my default date setting (seen in control panel/Regional and language options) is "English (United Kingdom)". However when I changed my setting to "English (United States)" this bug disappeared.

I think that Excel is reading the date from Cognos, but assumes that the date is in a US format. Thus if I have a UK default setting it encourages excel to reformat the date. When the default setting is US then excel doesn't try to reformat the date.