sort of a work around - I was able to format the date long form by adding ', dd MMMM yyyy' to the attribute in the designer. This way at least it is clearer to the user. I tried some other formats but they gave wacky results like the day part converting to day of the year (i.e. 365 for 12/31). Will try some more later, but for now at least users are not complaining that the system is messing up dates on reports...
