Default Date Format

In my Regional And Language setting the date format is dd/MM/yyyy and Excel does map the date entered in any cell to this format. eg if I start on a fresh excel sheet and enter 4/5/6 in any cell or I have a code line say [a1]=Cdate("4/5/6"), it displays as 04/05/2006 as expected. If I reformat the cell as dd-mmm-yyyy it correctly shows 04-May-2006 indicating excel has taken 4 as day, 5 as month and 6 as year.
However if my code is [a1]= "4/5/6" then A1 dispalys 4/5/2006 and if I format the cell as dd-mmm-yyyy it shows 05-April-2006. It shows that it tries to map the string to M/d/yyyy format. Same is true with Cstr. If my date is 04-May-2006 , Cstr converts it to the string "4/5/2006". One more observation - if I want to use literal date and try to type in a code line say [a1]= # 4 May 2006 # it automatically changes to [a1]=#4/5/2006# as soon as I complete the line and hit the return.

I have come to a conclusion that Excel has two different formats it tries to map the probable date strings to . One is the Regional setting and the other is M/d/yyyy which seems to be its own default setting. Am I right? If yes, then I want to know if I can have access to this default Excel preferred setting. And can if I change that also to dd/MM/yyyy?

A V Veerkar