How do I get dates back to UK format?

[FM Tid]

This is going to be lengthy to explain - please bear with me.

A while back, I noticed when I launched my FM6 files, that I got a message "Date and time are not the same as System settings - do you want them to be the same?" Obviously, I clicked "YES" - who wouldn't? Of COURSE I want my dates and times to be the same as the system settings!!

After that, I also began to notice that FM wasn't accepting dates in the (logical) UK format of DDMMYYYY - it was insisting "Dates must look like ...." and allowing only the endlessly frustrating, illogical US system of MMDDYYYY. This baffled me no end. The date on my Mac was displayed in the UK format - what had gone wrong?

I changed the definitions of some fields so they displayed in the UK format, though I still had to enter them in the US format. Some fields wouldn't change at all. That is the situation as it currently stands. What I want is to be able to redefine all my databases so that dates are data-entered and displayed in the UK format, as they used to be. In other words, to reverse the effect of clicking "YES" to that original message.

How do I do this?

(Oh - the cause of the problem? It took a while to uncover, but eventually I did. Although my iMac displays the date UK-style, I had changed it to a custom setting, so it would display seconds, as it always used to in OS9. HOWEVER, although it looks like a UK date from my Custom setting, I didn't know for a long time, that Custom settings always hold the actual date hidden in the US format, whatever it is displayed as.)

I'll be happy when all my dates are back in UK formats. I just need a way to do this.