“Civilized” Date Formats For The Rest Of Us

Every day, more people are getting online and the world is a whole lot smaller than it used to be. That’s really great, but a problem that’s been an ongoing issue in the world of electronic messaging is the date format.

Problems with date formats predate the internet and go back to the BBS messaging days. In America (en-US), the standard format is month/day/year whereas in the UK (en-GB) the format is day/month/year. 5 November 1985 would be 11/05/85 in the US and 05/11/85 in the UK. Remember, everyone used two-digit years back in the 1980s.

I will give my nod to the Brits that their format is more proper than ours because it makes more sense. In order of "bigness" from least-to-most, the order is second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year. The en-US format completely screws that up by switching day and month, and America considers that completely normal because it’s all we’ve ever known.

There is an international date standard, and it’s called ISO 8601; it employs the use of biggest-to-smallest concerning date formats. 29 November 2011 would be written as 2011-11-29. With computers this is good to use for many reasons (one of which is files listed by file date are always in order). From a human standpoint however it can lead to confusion with close-number days and months. If you’re used to the en-GB way of date formatting, 2011-12-11 to you reads as "2011 12 November". If you’re used to the en-US format, you see it as "2011 December 11".

The solution to this which partially adopts the ISO 8601 standard and is understood by everyone is the use of the named month in abbreviated form.

Using the same 2011-12-11 date example, with the abbreviated named month in place in 8601 style, it shows as 2011-Dec-11. On read there is absolutely no confusion whatsoever that the date is 11 December 2011. It’s human-friendly and understood universally.

Automating (most) apps to use the short date format you want

In Windows, the easiest way to automate almost any app (unless it has its own regional options) that outputs the date based on system calendar preferences (like Mozilla Thunderbird) is to directly modify the regional short date format (and long format, if desired).

In Windows 2000/XP:

Control Panel
Regional and Language Options
Regional Options (tab)
Customize (button)
Date (tab)
Choose Short date format as dd-MMM-yyyy, click OK

In Windows Vista and 7:

Control Panel
Clock, Language and Region
Region and Language > Change the date, time or number format
Additional Settings (button)
Date (tab)
Manually type in the short date as dd-MMM-yyyy
Click Apply (button) then OK (button).

Remember, this will modify how the date looks in the taskbar area. "Apply" will immediately show what it looks like. If you don’t like it, you can always switch back to what you had before.

Like what you read?

If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:

Anonymous
The way the date is read is not just a matter of mathematical ‘Lesser to greater’. It’s a Social Strategy to Manage Time that comes from an age when we didn’t have electronic calendar in every phone or PC screen.
Business cycles, social schedules, Seasonal schedules are marked by the MONTH. Plus, believe it or not, when you get older, you may know what TIME it is– but not necessarily what DAY it is. Or not be totally sure what MONTH it is when cognitive memory fugue hits.
Think of it this way. Knowing that it’s November (11) but not necessarily knowing what day it is is more important than knowing that it is now day 12 because your mind has already flagged that NOVEMBER has your Wife’s BIRTHDAY in it somewhere. SO you start being on the lookout. You have time to note the Birthday event on your calendar so you can take care of it. If you were to attempt to track your Wife’s B-Day by DAYS alone, you’d run the risk of being caught short. It’s a different strategy of managing Time.
mm/dd/yyyy won’t go away for a while yet. . .after all, Lbs, Inches and Gallons aren’t dead yet– and the Metric-Nazis have been pounding on that door for decades.

Anonymous
Yes, there is nothing very progressist about the United States even though it loves to call Europe “old” as in “so set in its old ways”.

Damien
everytime someone says 9/11 I have to remind myself it isn’t the 9th of november. Why can’t you yanks use the dd/mm/yy like the rest of the world
David
Why don’t you just use the week of the year 1-52, followed by the day MO, TU, WE, TH, FR, SA, SU, followed by the year?

Rich
For the reason that not all weeks in any given month are the same length in days. For example, this last week of Nov is only 4 days (27, 28, 29 and 30). This in turn would confuse people because they think “week” translates to a literal 7 days all the time.

bglyuyzky
The dd mm yy format is also used exclusively by the military; I have never used anything different since I vacated the Air Force back in 1974 as it MUCH more logical. It does screw up the clerks when they ask me for my birth date though….love it!!!