Group Policy – Use Regional Settings to change Date Format

Hello everyone. Today I want to share some knowledge with you which might be useful if you need to change the regional settings of your customers. Today I had the requirement to change the American Date format (MM/dd/yyyy) to the ISO8601 format (yyyy-MM-dd).

Configure Group Policy

First open Group Policy Management and go to User Configuration -> Preferences -> Control Panel Settings -> Regional Options.

Next right click on the area and choose New -> Regional Options.

Now go to Date and set the following values:

• Short date format: yyyy-MM-dd
• Date separator: –

Now the important part: Go through all tabs and press F5. You will notice that all red lines will change into green lines.

Now go to the Common tab and click on OK.

It is important to go through all tabs and to press F5 otherwise the settings will not apply. I do not know why but I found this solution here.

Apply the settings to your Clients

To apply the settings simply do the following things:

• Restart your Client machine

Or

Run cmd as Administrator and run the following command:

gpupdate /force

After the command executed successfully you need to Log off and Log on again on your Client machine to apply the settings.

The result will look like this:

That´s it. You have successfully changed the date format.

I wanted to share this information since I wasted quite some time searching for a solution why my settings would not apply. I hope this post is useful for you. See you next time.

Sources:

http://www.frickelsoft.net/blog/?p=126

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754020.aspx