MacOSXPhiles

For European Mac users, or anybody outside of the U.S. for that matter, who use different time, date, and currency formats than us Yanks do, there is a glitch in 10.4 that causes custom settings created in the Formats tab of the International Preference Pane to be reset whenever you change selections. If you choose a standard group of settings for a certain locale, such as the U.S., or the U.K., they will stick just fine, but if you need to customize them, you’re pretty well hosed, because the changes will not stick. This causes big problems in Excel spreadsheets where columns that are formatted to reflect numbers or currency, and in FileMaker Pro databases as well, because those macros use the system preferences for date, time, currency, and number formatting. Users are finding that after migrating to 10.4, their databases and spreadsheets have all been changed, and there is no way to get around this problem.

There is actually a very simple way to resolve this. But just to warn you, this fix could present problems with future 10.4 updates, because you’re modifying system files. Personally, I don’t think it will do any harm, but if Apple decides to fix it in the future, there could be conflicts due to an update not seeing what it expects to find. The fix itself works flawlessly, so there’s nothing to worry about there, but just keep it in mind when updating to future releases of 10.4.

Ok, so on with the show. What you need to do to resolve this issue is replace the 10.4 version of Localization.prefPane, located in the /System/Library/PreferencePanes folder, with the Panther version (I took mine from 10.3.9). Before you replace it, I strongly recommend backing up the 10.4 version of this file to a safe location, just in case you need to put it back later. Once you’ve backed it up, delete it from your 10.4 /System/Library/PreferencePanes folder, and copy in the same file from 10.3.9. You’ll have to authenticate to do this, so you should be logged in as an administrator. When prompted with a dialog box, choose Authenticate, and enter your admin password. Again, I only tested this with the Localization.prefPane taken from 10.3.9, so using a copy from another 10.3.x version may not produce the same results. I’m not sure in what OS X version this file was last modified, but as far as I know, it was the same in the 10.3.8.

Now you can open System Preferences, click on the International preference pane, choose the format tab, and you will see that it’s now the same as it was in Panther. Make all of the necessary changes to customize your date formats, time, and number preferences, and the system will now accept those changes. I tested this with an Excel spreadsheet, and took a screenshot of a column formated for currency. I’m using the standard locale setting for the U.S., with custom date, time and number formats.

As a postscript, I see that this problem is not on the list of fixes in 10.4.1, which was released yesterday, so people need to start sending in feedback to get this into 10.4.2.

Filed under: Mac OS X Tips

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