date change from american format

Check the date format used in the dedicated page when you set Region to UK.

On my French system, if I switch to English and set the region to UK, I remain on dd/mm/yyyy dates.

I must customize the format by hand if I want mm/dd/yyyy.

So, I'm not really surprised if setting region to UK isn’t sufficient to get dd/mm/yyyy on your US system.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) Wednesday, 11 January 2012 17:40:04

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>

I don't think this is a setting you can change from within Numbers, you have to set your system region to be United Kingdom.

To do this goto System Prefrences > Language & Text > Formats and set the Region to United Kingdom.

This might even change all of the dates in numbers automatically!

There is a way to make a custom format, but you should only use this as a last resort. There should be a way to make numbers do this automaticaly, but i can't find it!

To make a custom format go to Inspector > Cell Format Drop Down > Custom

Enter a name for the custom format >

Select Date & Time from the type dropdown >

You will see the date in three sections, you can drag each section to the order that you would like.

Note that these custom formats do not show under Date & Time in the cell format dropdown, they have their own section at the bottom of the list.

Hope this helps!

I may be misunderstanding, but it sounds like you have entered March 6 in a cell. Changing the date format can only change the way March 6 is displayed, it can't change it to June 3.

Changing international settings may be able to alter the way dates are detected and entered, but it won't retroactively affect ones that are already there. (That is, it will affect the display, but it won't change the underlying data that is stored in a cell.)