Question

I have a spreadsheet I created mid-August which has a table with one column for every day since then. The column header is the day’s date. The date is displayed how I want it to be displayed: “dd/mm/yyyy”

However, I have macro which needs to read these dates in order to perform its work. Because I am using a table, the dates seem to be held as text rather than as 5-digit numbers (when I set the header cells’ format to “General”, it remains with the “dd/mm/yyyy” format rather than changing to a 5-digit number. This wasn’t a problem until the 1st of September, after which CDate (in the macro) began reading these dates as “mm/dd/yyyy”

Is there any way to make CDate recognise the Australian date format rather than the American? Or failing that, make the table headers stay as dates rather than as text? I’d rather avoid having to convert the Table back to a range, as the macro is designed to use table attributes, ListColumns etc.

UPDATE:

I’ve narrowed down the problem. It isn’t the date, but the ListColumn.Name property. For some reason it is re-converting my date. I’m using Format() to set the date format, like so:

CreateHistoryColumn.Name = Format(headerDate, "dd/mm/yyyy")

MsgBox Day(headerDate) & "/" & Month(headerDate) & "/" & Year(headerDate)
MsgBox Format(headerDate, "dd/mm/yyyy")
MsgBox CreateHistoryColumn.Name

Where CreateHistoryCol is an object of class ListColumn. The 3 MsgBox calls display the following:

6/9/2012
06/09/2012
9/06/2012

So the Format() call formats the date correctly, but the call to ListColumn.Name serves to alter the format to “mm/dd/yyyy”.

Answer 1

As I showed in the update, the ListColumn.Name method was responsible for the unwanted conversion. I still don’t know why, but there is any easy fix:

CreateHistoryColumn.Name = CLng(headerDate)

This forces the header to be treated as a number, and therefore it can be recognised as its proper date. I can’t explain it any further than that.