MS Word 2010 and the UK date format

Why oh why do Microsoft make things more and more obscure with each iteration of their Office products? Today I had to battle with a new issue. After creating a letter using one of the default templates, I selected the date from a drop-down box only to find that it was in the US format (mm/dd/yyyy) with no apparent way of changing it to the UK format (dd/mm/yyyy).

After much searching in the less-than-helpful help files, and doing some googling, I came across a solution that somebody had posted for MS Word 2007.

This was helpful, but I found in Word 2010 I was missing something vital that they had described - a "Developer" tab! So, I found how to enable this and thought I would share the knowledge...

First you need to click on the File tab, then select Options from the Help sub-menu. Once in the options screen, select Customize Ribbon from the options on the left. Under the Main Tabs on the right, you should see that Developer is unchecked. Check the box and click OK.

Now select the Developer tab and click on the date in order to select it. In the Controls section of the “ribbon” you should see a button labelled Properties.

Click this while you have the date selected and you should be presented with the following window where you can adjust the date format to match what you expect to see here in the UK. To do this, change the “Locale” from “English (U.S.)” to “English (U.K.)”

I hope this saves somebody from the searching that I had to do in order to solve what should be a very simple problem.