There's a quiet frustration in this reader's plea, and it's one we understand completely. You've done the responsible thing: you checked the Control Panel, you confirmed your regional settings, and you've dutifully changed the date format in Excel each time you open a new workbook. Yet the commas persist, like an uninvited guest who refuses to take the hint. Our take is simple: this isn't a problem with your understanding of the tool, and it's not a personal failure. It's a gap between what your system tells you and what your spreadsheet actually does with that information.
The root issue here is that Excel doesn't always treat your regional settings as the final word on date formatting. In many cases, the application's default date format is tied to the system locale, but not in the way you'd expect. You can change the Control Panel until you're blue in the face, and Excel may still default to a format it has cached or inherited from an older template or an initial installation setting. The fact that you can manually adjust it in each new spreadsheet only confirms that the capability is there, but the persistence of the comma format suggests Excel is applying a default that overrides your system preference. It's not a bug you can click away; it's a configuration that lives deeper in the application's own settings.
What this means for you, practically, is that you have a few straightforward paths forward. You can create a custom date format in Excel's settings and save it as your default template, which would apply every time you start a new workbook. You could also adjust the "Default Date Format" in Excel's advanced options, if your version supports it, or you could simply accept the manual change as a minor ritual. But here's the thing: you shouldn't have to. A tool that prides itself on flexibility shouldn't make you repeat the same correction on every file. The real takeaway is that your frustration is valid, and the solution lies not in fighting the system, but in finding the one setting that actually sticks.
So, before you give up or resign yourself to a lifetime of comma-filled dates, take a few minutes to explore Excel's own default template options. Create a blank workbook, set the date format you want, and save it as a template named "Book.xltx" in your Excel startup folder. That single step will likely end the cycle. It's a small fix, but it's the kind of fix that restores your sense of control. And that's what this is really about: not accepting a stubborn default, but knowing where to look to make your tools work for you.