Microsoft Teams: Changing the First Day of the Week

Did you know there’s an international standard for date and time data? It’s called the International Standard ISO 8601 and it states that Monday is the first day of the week. While the majority of countries adopted this standard, some consider that Sunday is the first day of the week. For example, in the United States and Canada, the first day of the week is Sunday. On the other hand, in the UK and Australia, the week starts on Monday.

By default, Microsoft Teams considers Saturday as the last day of the week, while Sunday being the first. However, that date setup doesn’t really help if you live in a country where the week starts on Monday. That’s why many non-US Teams users are wondering if there’s a way to change the first day of the week.

The bad news is that Microsoft Teams doesn’t currently feature a built-in option to change the order of days on the calendar. However, there are two workarounds that you can use to get the job done.

How to Change the First Day of the Week in Microsoft Teams

Change the App Language Settings

One quick workaround is to change the app language of the Teams client and set it to English UK. In this manner, your week starts on Monday and ends on Sunday. If you switch back to English US, you’ll have Sunday to Saturday again. Or you can change the language settings to any language you speak that has Monday as the first day of the week.

1. Launch Teams and click on your profile picture.
2. Then select General and scroll down to Language.
3. Use the drop-down menu and select the app language you want.

Change Outlook Settings

Other users managed to change the first day of the week in Teams by editing the calendar settings in Outlook.

1. Go to outlook.office.com or outlook.live.com and log into your Outlook account.
2. Then go to Settings and select  View all Outlook settings (bottom of the screen).
3. Select Calendar, then View and locate these two options:
   • Show the first day of the week as
   • Show work week as
4. Edit the settings to your liking and apply the changes.
5. After that, restart Teams and Outlook and check the results.

Conclusion

In Microsoft Teams, the first day of the week is based on your app language settings.

It’s really annoying that Teams doesn’t have a separate date and time option to change the first day of the week. The closest option to that is hidden under the language settings. Having calendar settings hardcoded into language settings is not the best approach product design-wise.

What do you think about the current Microsoft Teams date and time settings? Is there anything you’d change about them? Share your thoughts in the comments below.