Solved Adding day to system tray clock produces Excel date format side effect

I was glad to find seconds are now natively supported by the system tray clock.

I also wanted to display the three character day of week abbreviation with the date. I changed the language and region short date format to ddd MM/dd/yy and my system clock date and time are perfect now.

However, changing the short date had an unexpected side effect. Excel (2016, installed locally) now shows dates by default with spaces where the '/' used to be, e.g. 02 18 2024 instead of 02/18/2024.

It was easy to create a custom date format in Excel with '/' characters. But... Wondering what else on my system has been affected...

Is there a better way to display the day of week with a short date, while still remaining native Win11? Thanks!

I don't know, but you might try setting the short date in this panel to what you want in Excel and the long date to what you want in the tray clock. Not difficult, and might work.

pseudonym said:

I was glad to find seconds are now natively supported by the system tray clock.

I also wanted to display the three character day of week abbreviation with the date. I changed the language and region short date format to ddd MM/dd/yy and my system clock date and time are perfect now.

However, changing the short date had an unexpected side effect. Excel (2016, installed locally) now shows dates by default with spaces where the '/' used to be, e.g. 02 18 2024 instead of 02/18/2024.

It was easy to create a custom date format in Excel with '/' characters. But... Wondering what else on my system has been affected...

Is there a better way to display the day of week with a short date, while still remaining native Win11? Thanks!

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That is an issue isn't it, as it becomes a system-wide change.
It changed the date format in Outlook 365 as well, which was not welcome.
I ended up rolling back the change.

I've tried making the same change as you and I get the day on the taskbar with the time. But with Excel (Office 2021) dates, the '/' is replaced by ',' - ie it now shows 18,02,2024 for todays date (UK format).

Bizarre that Microsoft's own OS affects Mirosoft's own products! Or not. We are used to that, aren't we.

pseudonym said:

Bizarre that Microsoft's own OS affects Mirosoft's own products! Or not. We are used to that, aren't we.

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You must have a date format that can be consistent across an OS.
Do you imagine the disaster if you had dates driven by varied programs & apps?
A choice had to be made. To tailor to each's needs and preferences is simply not practical.
There is a 3rd party program called ElevenClock that lets you configure what you see on your taskbar.

OAT said:

You must have a date format that can be consistent across an OS.

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Never argued this... just saying Microsoft's own OS badly affects Microsoft's own product (Excel). You'd think there'd be better testing, but we know better, don't we. It would have made sense to me if Excel started displaying ddd MM/dd/yy for date format (consistent across OS) but that's not what happened.

This is what I use on my computers but I do not use the seconds on my Notebooks/Laptops because of the associated warning that doing so affects the battery, shortens its use/charge. I haven't seen any issue with date/time on Microsoft 365 yet so maybe the age of the program can make a difference.

Berton said:

This is what I use on my computers but I do not use the seconds on my Notebooks/Laptops because of the associated warning that doing so affects the battery, shortens its use/charge. I haven't seen any issue with date/time on Microsoft 365 yet so maybe the age of the program can make a difference.

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That looks nice. I like mine visible in the tray so I don't have to hover, just glance.

pseudonym said:

I was glad to find seconds are now natively supported by the system tray clock.

I also wanted to display the three character day of week abbreviation with the date. I changed the language and region short date format to ddd MM/dd/yy and my system clock date and time are perfect now.

However, changing the short date had an unexpected side effect. Excel (2016, installed locally) now shows dates by default with spaces where the '/' used to be, e.g. 02 18 2024 instead of 02/18/2024.

It was easy to create a custom date format in Excel with '/' characters. But... Wondering what else on my system has been affected...

Is there a better way to display the day of week with a short date, while still remaining native Win11? Thanks!

View attachment 87570

Click to expand...

Just found what to me is a satisfactory solution. Specify your short date as ddd/MM/dd/yyyy and then it appears in the tray as Sun/02/18/2024, and is also correct in Excel with the '/'. Wife's PC has Excel 2016 (has Home and Business 2016 installed locally) and it works correctly now too.

RFS said:

Just found what to me is a satisfactory solution. Specify your short date as ddd/MM/dd/yyyy and then it appears in the tray as Sun/02/18/2024, and is also correct in Excel with the '/'. Wife's PC has Excel 2016 (has Home and Business 2016 installed locally) and it works correctly now too.

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It never occurred to me to try that... Brilliant!
Still wondering what else I'll uncover is b0rked by this setting...
Thanks for this!

pseudonym said:

It never occurred to me to try that... Brilliant!
Still wondering what else I'll uncover is b0rked by this setting...
Thanks for this!

Click to expand...

Finally realized what's happening. When you specify the date as ddd?MM/dd/yyyy it's whatever you've used in the ? field that Excel is using as the delimiter. Suspect it's probably working by accident rather than design ....

RFS said:

Just found what to me is a satisfactory solution. Specify your short date as ddd/MM/dd/yyyy and then it appears in the tray as Sun/02/18/2024, and is also correct in Excel with the '/'. Wife's PC has Excel 2016 (has Home and Business 2016 installed locally) and it works correctly now too.

Click to expand...

Just noticed, while it did fix the issue with Excel, long dates everywhere display with the slash too (which makes sense, it's the 'new' long date format). File explorer, for example.

Would be nice if we could just directly customize the systray clock without involving international date format changes, etc.