Date Formats in SharePoint
To ensure that dates are formatted correctly across your WSS or MOSS site there are a couple of settings you may need to change.
First of all the regional settings should reflect the current locale. This can be changed from Site Actions > Site Settings > Regional Settings and ensuring the locale is correct. This should ensure all controls that display dates are formatted correctly.
If you are using XSLT to display dates (such as in a data view web part) you may need to update these also. One way of doing this is to take advantage of the format-date extension function provided by MSXML. This is included in the XSL for the dataview by default, but you can use this and other MSXML extension functions by including a reference to the Microsoft XPath extension functions (urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt) at the top of your XSL stylesheet i.e.
<xsl:stylesheet ... xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt">
You can then use the format-date (and format-time) functions like so:
<xsl:value-of select="msxsl:format-date(@_DCDateCreated, 'dd/MM/yyy')"/>
This will format the date in the form 30/03/2007. The Microsoft XPath extension functions page contains a full list of formatting characters.
Note: you can also take advantage of the format-date function in other .NET applications that use xsl transforms.
