I’m being asked from time to time about whether Quick To-Do Pro can display time in another format, because many people find US format MM/dd/yyyy quite unnatural.
The answer is – YES. Moreover, Quick To-Do Pro always uses format the user prefers (i.e. specified in system settings). Localised versions of Windows (German, Russian, etc) set date/time format common in the corresponding country during the installation process, however, English-speaking users from UK, Australia, New Zealand are being supplied with a stock-standard version of Windows, which is programmed around US market. Fair enough, US is the biggest English-speaking market and Microsoft has all the rights to do what they do and changing Regional Settings is pretty simple, but unfortunately, not all users are aware that they can change their system default Windows date format (US English) to their local format (Australian or British English in this case) with few mouse clicks.
Here is the instruction (I’m using Windows XP Professional in the example, however it applies to all versions of Windows, with slight variations in names of buttons):
1. Click Start button, Choose Control Panel and select Regional and Language Options.
2. Select your preferred language from Language drop-down
3. If you would like to customise your settings, press Customize… button and then change Short Date Format mask
Some hints for date format masks:
M/dd/yy – 9/21/06
M/dd/yyyy – 9/21/2006
MM/dd/yyyy – 09/21/2006
dd/MM/yyyy – 21/09/2006
dd/MMM/yyyy – 21/Oct/2006
dd/MMMM/yyyy – 21/October/2006
Please take a look at the screenshot of the settings dialog (click to enlarge)
The instructions given on your website for changing local date format is very comprehensive. But do you know how to change ALL users Date format at the same time?
If you have administrative rights, you can try to change the following key in registry:
[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\International]
“sShortDate”=”M/d/yyyy”
You need to use Windows Registry Editor
* click Start button
* choose Run…
* type REGEDIT
* press OK button
navigate to the key above and change the value to your desired format. This should work, unless, of course, it’s already overridden in individual user settings. In this case you need to follow instructions in the original blog post.
Hope this helps.