Better tools for managing genomic information are probably out there, but if everyone picks Excel (or workalikes that all do automatic date formating too), then hoping people switch is tilting at windmills.
Unilaterally declaring you will not use names that confuse Excel will fix the problem (until we get new month names, anyway), and not require anyone outside their sphere of influence to comply.
I had the same situation at work, as an aquired company we had servers named devX, the new parent had servers named devX and pushed ssh config files to our laptops that made it impossible to connect to our servers; we asked them to fix it the first couple times, but eventually renamed our servers to vedX to avoid the issue. It wasn't the right solution, but it was a stable solution and let us get on with our lives instead of fighting with IT.
Unilaterally declaring you will not use names that confuse Excel will fix the problem (until we get new month names, anyway), and not require anyone outside their sphere of influence to comply.
I had the same situation at work, as an aquired company we had servers named devX, the new parent had servers named devX and pushed ssh config files to our laptops that made it impossible to connect to our servers; we asked them to fix it the first couple times, but eventually renamed our servers to vedX to avoid the issue. It wasn't the right solution, but it was a stable solution and let us get on with our lives instead of fighting with IT.