Reporting Services may not display dates and times in the format you want or were expecting. Fortunately if you want to set an explicit format (such as dd/mm/yyyy) for a field on a report then it’s straightforward to do this, and without using any code or expressions. To demonstrate this I’ve created a very simple report that displays the contents of the Production.ProductCategory table on the AdventureWorks2008R2 sample database using a tablix. When I run the report on my computer the datetime field in that table is displayed in a US format format, as follows :


However I can change the format so that it displays the field as dd/mm/yyyy (or any other format – see below for some details on that), as follows :


To change the format select the textbox control in the report designer, click on F4 to display the properties window and enter dd/MM/yyyy for the format property (using an upper case M as lower case is for minutes), as follows :


There are plenty of other date formats to choose from, here are a few examples for UK style dates and times :

Format	Result
dd/MM/yyyy	01/06/2002
dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss	01/06/2002 21:43:01
dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm:ss tt	01/06/2002 09:43:01 PM
dd MMMM yyyy	01 June 2002
dddd d MMMM yyyy	Saturday 1 June 2002