The regional settings on your computer control how things such as the time and currencies are displayed on your computer. For example, if you wanted to change your computer time to display in the 24 hour format, this is where you go to change it.
The regional settings on your computer actually impacts other programs as well, for example the thousand and decimal separator used in Excel is actually set in the regional settings, as well as how dates and times are displayed in Outlook.
.png)
Press the Windows button and type “Control Panel”, then click the Control Panel icon in the search results to open it. Next, click the Region option on the control panel to open the dialog box for these settings. A quick way to set these settings is to select your region from the format drop down list.
.png)
Below the format drop down list are two more drop down lists which allow you to set the format of the date. A “d” by itself represents the Day in a single or double digit, so the first of the month would show as 1, without a preceding 0. dd represents the day in a double digit format, so the first of the month would show as 01. The same applies for the month (m).
.png)
In the long date settings, 4 letters in a row indicate the day or month spelled out, rather than in number form, and three letters in a row indicate an abbreviated version of the day or month. The time format is similar, with the difference that a lowercase h indicates the 12 hour format, and a capital H, the 24 hour time format.
.png)
By clicking the “Additional Settings” button, you can access extra settings, including customized settings for the date and time, as well as how numbers are displayed and the default currency sign, which would impact how numbers are displayed by default in Excel. If at any time you want to undo any changes you have made, click the Reset button at the bottom of this window.
