>The fun only really begins when you are not in the right regional setting. When that happens excel accepts anything that is look ok as a date (even if actually it is not what was meant), and transforms anything else in a string, all without warning, leaving you with a column with mixed format and the dreaded green triangles that are absolutely useless. No human algorithm can sort that one out.

>If this is a possibility Dragan, be prepared to get really frustrated :). Must have something to do with what you undoubtedly would call US centered computing (read : the mm/dd/yy notation rules).

Ah, I've seen (and bloggued) such sparks of artificial intelligence long ago, and for that I was prepared. Even so, when I first tried to export these sheets into CSV (which I can import much faster), the dates would get exported as 24.okt.2012, even though my system shortdate is set to 20.10.2012 and my longdate to 24. oktobar 2012. So the bloody excel insists on some halflong format, no matter what - ans that's the good old excel 2003.

The 2010 version gives me ###################################################################### for the blank dates and, amazingly, date in the proper local format, but then I couldn't use that because some other things were lost - and by the time I got there, there were some 100+ files to do... which I eventually got to work from excel. It's just that with every new version there are so many new gotchas. It's trying to be smart with our data, and if the data get lost, it doesn't matter - what matters is that they look nice.