Bizarre Date Format Behaviour With Excel Import

Hi

I have an excel file with 2 rows that I am importing into a staging table. The format on the excel sheet is a custom one which is DD-MMM-YY so in the actual cell the data appears as 01-NOV-07 and 30-OCT-07. The format of the data in the input window above the spreadsheet is 01/11/2007 and 30/10/2007.

The format in the Excel source of the data flow task is Unicode String [DT_WSTR] length 255. I then have a data conversion step that changes this to a string [DT_STR] length 255 as the staging table is non unicode. I then have a derived column function that simply does a ISNULL replace on NULL values to blank. Finally there is an OLE DB destination which is the staging table.

This is where the problem occurs. If I breakpoint the package here and look at the staging table the dates now read as 11/1/2007 and 10/30/2007. The data type in the staging table is varchar 255. I am not doing any other transformations or T-SQL stuff on the data - it is being flipped to MM/DD/YYYY during the import.

By the way I am english hence I need the english variation on the date. I know i could put some T-SQL in to flip it around to english again but wondered why it was happening like this

thanks in advance