tables connected to cms not showing dates correctly; dates are shown EU version of month date year instead of day month year regardless what settings i adjust.
There are two separate controls here and you are probably only changing one.
The site-level control decides the order. Go to Language & Region in your site’s dashboard and check Regional Format. That is what governs how dates, numbers and measurements appear across the site. If it is set to a US region you get month/day/year no matter which named format you pick on the element, which is exactly the symptom you are describing. Check that first, it is the cheapest test.
The element-level control decides which named format is used. Select the table, open its Settings, and use the Date format dropdown. That dropdown only appears if the column is connected to a Date field type.
Which is worth confirming before anything else. If the field in your collection is a Text field holding a date string rather than a Date field, no format setting applies at all and the value renders exactly as stored. That also produces “nothing I change makes any difference”. Open the collection and check the field type.
Then publish. Format changes need a publish to reach the live site and preview does not always reflect them.
One correction on the terminology, because it may be sending you to the wrong setting. Month/day/year is the US format. Day/month/year is the European one. You have them the other way round in your post, so if you have been looking for an EU option to switch off, that is why you have not found it.
If your regional format is already correct and none of the offered formats gives you day/month/year, then you have hit a documented limit rather than a misconfiguration. Wix has an open feature request for customisable date formats, status “We are collecting votes for this issue”, covering exactly this: reordering and custom layouts are not available through the standard settings. The workaround is CMS expressions with date functions, or store a preformatted string in a text field and bind the column to that instead.