Excel in Office 12: text to columns

1. Text to columns for 'General' fields offers an 'Advanced' option to alter decimal and thousands separators so that they conform to the incoming data, not to the existing regional settings. Making the obvious settings in Excel 2000 works fine, commas as decimal separators recognised and properly converted. I now have inflicted on me Excel under Office 12, and making the obvious settings seems to be ignored by the conversion, i.e. I can't get a comma recognised as a decimal separator, and values containing commas are treated as text. Is there something I should know, is this something that simply doesn't work, or what?

2. Importing files to Excel in which data fields are separated by @. First file goes OK, text to columns all in order (except for the problem noted above). Second file, pasted to another worksheet, gets automatically and immediately converted text to columns. Problem is, that the wretched program is smart enough to remember that the @ is a field separator, but it's not smart enough to remember that the dates are converted YMD (yes, this works OK) and screws them all up (actually, not correct---it only screws half of them up, which makes it even harder to put right). So how do I stop it from doing the text-to-colums conversion for long enough to have time to set the date conversions to what the data requires? (Yes, import all the files before converting any of them is a possibility---given 100% foresight. So is opening a new Excel, and importing the second file to that; but since the second Excel doesn't know the first Excel exists, I can't copy the converted worksheet to the existing Book.)

Grateful for any suggestions

Nuuker