show text-date as a result of named field formula

[brum17]

Hi, I'm stuck with a problem.

In our software we keep some data as named field values. As we had some problems with various regional settings, we decided to tweak up the way on how the formulas are stored.

Let's say I call my Named field "DoJob", To make date culture-invariant I put in there something like =DATE(2010,1,1) ..so far so good, but when I set value of the cell to "DoJob", only excel date number is shown [40176]... I know, this could be easily resolved by bhanging cell format, BUT...our software is used by average-to below-average computer users that got confused when suddenly instead of date a 5-digit number was shown, so this is not an option.

I know I could do something like =TEXT(DATE(2010,1,1),"my desired format") ... BUT [why there always has to be one ?? ] that destroys the whole idea of culture-invariance, thus I would like to ask to the best of the best...

Reason for all this - we have some report-templates that use excel functions such as YEAR, MONTH, etc., which don't work when adapted to different culture

Is there a way I could achieve string [text] representation of current date without specifying the exact format and without using VBA macro ? ...something like =TEXT(DATE(2010,1,1),"currentCulture")

Any help would be strongly appreciated,
Piplislav Pindol

[6StringJazzer]

Welcome to the Forum!

The named field aspect is a red herring. I have attached something that shows how to format a date based on selection of a "culture" but you have to set up a table defining what cultures you want and what formats to use. See if this helps.