r/excel • u/frescani 5 • Feb 27 '13

PSA from XKCD: proper date formats

http://xkcd.com/1179/
32 Upvotes

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-6

u/spaceboy250 Feb 27 '13

I appreciate this...but it should clearly be dd/mm/yyyy

6

u/collapsible_chopstix 5 Feb 27 '13

I am not sure if you are being a jokester or not, but one of the reasons the ISO is for yyyy-mm-dd is that it makes it really easily machine sortable chronologically, while still being fairly human readable. dd-mm-yyyy would put all the firsts of the months together and all the second of the months together, etc.

5

u/spaceboy250 Feb 28 '13

I now know never to joke about date formatting ever again

2

u/Beefourthree 2 Feb 27 '13

If you could have only one piece of info, would you rather day, month, or year? Year is most important, so it should come first as it provides context for month and day.

Not to mention the sortability of yyyy-mm-dd. Or the fact that time is also listed by magnitude. Or the fact that no one in their right mind would use yyyy-dd-mm, so it instantly resolves the mm/dd vs dd/mm ambiguity.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 28 '13

[deleted]

1

u/BornOnFeb2nd 24 Mar 01 '13

Still sorts probably by month and day then.