Converting US date to EU date Permanently Excel for Mac

Hi,

Excel sets the dates automatically to US dates (MM/DD/YY). I need to work with large files with a lot of dates and need to do this more often in the future, where I dont want to change the formatting every time. I wish to make my dates in excel EU Dates (DD/MM/YY) permanently.

I have tried fixes like 'text to columns', formatting the cells to a different region, and even writing out the dates in separate cells and using the 'date' function (which did not work), but none of this is permanent.

Is there any way to do this on MacOS Sequoia and excel 16.93.1 ?

Thank you!