Last week while entering data into Excel, I noticed that it started making me enter the date in opposite (example, instead of entering 07 10 for July 10th, it made me type in 10 07 to get the final entery as 07/10/09) Now its not showing the dash or slash between the numbers in the date format What did I do to make it start formatting the date this way? and when i go into Format/cell/number it shows the date formats without any slashes or dashes, how do I get it back to default and how do i decide whether to puit slashes or dashes into the date format? help! thanks

The default date and time settings for all Office apps are set via the Control Panel...Regional and Language Settings. Click the Customize button and then choose the Date and/or Time tabs.

Thanks, I didnt realize changing the way the date looked on your desktop (lower right corner) affected the ay the date appeared in all of MS applications Stupid engineering in my opinion but oh well thanks for the heads up, that worked