but I am still wondering, why it worked last year ...

FWLIW, I did venture an explanation for you much, much earlier,
re - my response somewhere further up in this thread:
----------------------------------
.. in A2, I enter "1/3" (ie 3th Jan) and I expect A2 to
read "3 Jan 2008", but "3 Jan 2009" appeared.

well, that was precisely my point/suggestion to you in my earlier response,


A real date is a full valid, unambiguous date
(day-month-year) recognized by Excel, eg: 01-Jan-2009.

If you always practice entering dates as full dates, you won't get caught
out with ambiguities such as what happened as you described. If you don't
enter the date with the year in it - that's what you did, Excel will then
assume the year is the current year (from the PC's clock), hence you get:
"3 Jan 2009". You got "3 Jan 2008" previously because you entered it
sometime last year (in 2008). Take my suggestion, never skimp on the data
entry step when it comes to dates. Always enter it unambiguously in full,
inclusive of the year, and use "mmm" format to denote the month as well in
the date entry.
-----------------------------------

I figured I will have to stick to this input, 3/1/8

And sooner or later, you're bound to get into difficulties again with that
kind of ambiguous date input.

My suggestion: Never skimp on the data entry step when it comes to entering
dates. Always enter dates unambiguously in full, inclusive of the year
(enter the year in full, eg: 2008, 2009), and use "mmm" format to denote the
month as well in the date entry (eg: Jan, Feb, etc) -- to distinguish the
"month" part of it clearly from the "day"

Examples of unambiguous date entries:

3 Jan 2008
15 Feb 2009
27 Jul 2007
etc
--
Max
Singapore
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