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

pseudonym · Feb 18, 2024

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!

Wisewiz · Feb 18, 2024

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.

OAT · Feb 18, 2024

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

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.

RFS · Feb 18, 2024

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).

pseudonym · Feb 18, 2024

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

OAT · Feb 18, 2024

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

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.

ElevenClock - Official app in the Microsoft Store

ElevenClock is an application that will put a customizable clock on your Windows 11 taskbars. When Microsoft's engineers were creating Windows 11, they forgot to both add a clock on the secondary screen taskbar and to make the primarty clock customizable .So that's what I did. ElevenClock is the...

apps.microsoft.com

pseudonym · Feb 18, 2024

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

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.

Berton · Feb 18, 2024

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.

pseudonym · Feb 18, 2024

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.

View attachment 87587

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

RFS · Feb 18, 2024

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

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.

pseudonym · Feb 18, 2024

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.

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

RFS · Feb 18, 2024

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!

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 ....

pseudonym · Mar 14, 2024

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.

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.

CraigD · Jul 5, 2024

It appears the variable string in Region is being passed off to subsequent programs incorrectly, EXCEPT for the icon tray clock. Let me illustrate what happens in Outlook as well as the clock.

Photo 1: Reset.png
In Windows 11 "Region/Advanced settings...Date (tab)" I reset the formatting to start from scratch.

Day of the Week shows in Outlook "Received" column ("Fri 7/5 1/23 PM)"
Day of the Week does not show in icon tray clock ("1:28 PM 7/5/2024")

Photo 2: Customize.png
Add "ddd," to the date string for "Short date".

Icon tray clock is perfect! It now shows "Fri, " before the date: "Fri, 7/5/2024"
Outlook, however, moves the comma to the RIGHT of the month! And none of the format options offered has a slash in the date. All commas, not just after the month but also between the date and the year.

Photo 3: Slash.png
Change the comma to a slash, just to prove the issue.

Icon tray clock now shows "Fri/ 7/5/2024. This is to be expected.
Outlook now puts a slash after the month which, even though it looks somewhat right, is wrong. It should be after the Fri. It also now puts a space after all slashes. Look at the formats offered and you'll see what I mean.

For the record, all these results are the same when I simply add "ddd " with no comma or slash. There just ends up being a space where the comma or slash would be.

It seems clear to me that in the code, they are manipulating the string variable incorrectly. It seems to affect other programs like Outlook and Excel, but not the icon tray clock, so there must be a separate routine for passing it off to a system item like the clock as opposed to applications. Whichever routine parses the variable to be passed off to other applications is the guilty party.

A programmer needs to sit down and look at the code for an hour. It's not that difficult to fix, just a simple string manipulation mistake, but it will never fix itself. No amount of tweaking our settings will fix this for us.

dacrone · Jul 8, 2024

Try to use charmap 200B blank cataracter instead of a space after the day ddd and see what happens with excel/ explorer

CraigD · Jul 8, 2024

In Character Map, in the "Go to Unicode:" box I enter "200B". It seems to find it, as the map changes, an empty-looking box gets selected, and at the bottom of dialog box it shows "U+200B: Zero Width Space". I click the "Copy" button.

I'm not seeing how to paste such a thing into the Format string. I use ctrl-V, but nothing pastes. I opened a blank Word document to see what happens when I paste in there I see what looks like a carriage return-line feed. I assume it's the 200B plus a line feed. But pasting into the Format string doesn't appear to be successful, as the cursor doesn't move at all.

dacrone · Jul 8, 2024

It’s an invisible character. It pastes but nothing shows. Test this: open file explorer, sort by name, create a folder named (paste 200b)z and it’ll be above A

CraigD · Jul 8, 2024

That was pretty slick. I created a folder with just that character.

So then I went and did as you suggested in the Region settings, but received this error: "One or more of the characters you entered for the Short Date format are invalid. Try using different characters."

JoshLWW · Monday at 1:59 PM

pseudonym said:
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.
View attachment 90236
Would be nice if we could just directly customize the systray clock without involving international date format changes, etc.

"Would be nice if we could just directly customize the systray clock without involving international date format changes, etc."
THIS! Sometimes I feel like programmers are narrowminded. The nature of intuitive UI is that things should do what you expect them to when you click on or change something. When I messed with my taskbar clock it's because I wanted my task bar to display something. At that moment I'm not thinking through how this is changing the way Exel, (or in my case Cabinet Vision), or ANY other program is working.

JoshLWW · Monday at 3:11 PM

OK, I installed ElevenClock and so far so good!

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

Well-known member

My Computer

𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐬 𝐀𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐆𝐞𝐞𝐤

My Computers

Pragmatic Member

My Computers

Well-known member

My Computers

Well-known member

My Computer

Pragmatic Member

My Computers

Well-known member

My Computer

Ret. ATC

My Computers

Well-known member

My Computer

Well-known member

My Computers

Well-known member

My Computer

Well-known member

My Computers

Well-known member

My Computer

New member

Attachments

My Computer

Well-known member

My Computer

New member

My Computer

Well-known member

My Computer

New member

My Computer

Member

My Computer

Member

My Computer

Similar threads