the standard is always set to m.d.y and there is no way to set the preferences to d.m.y.
somewhere it was wrote that it takes the preferences which are set as specific from Windows, but this is not working.
Another phenomena is that if you script it, like this, it works only after updating data from mssql server it works or if you do it manually by hand (m.d.y --> d.m.y over column info)
col=Column("An_Dt");
col<<data type("numeric")<< modeling type("continuous") << Format ("d.m.y",12)<<Input Format ("d.m.y");