servodude wrote:kiloran wrote:When working at my employer to define a new global software system, we decided on ddmmmyy (27Jan24) as the date format to be displayed on screens and printouts. Worked globally (americas, europe, asia) with no confusion, and became the standard in spreadsheets etc. Excel interprets it as a date, it's sortable in a spreadsheet. I've used it ever since in everything I do
--kiloran
True... it works
But the one true correct answer is YYYYMMDD(HHmmSS)
Cos it works in a sort even if all you have is alphanumeric parsing
Yes, that works on a technical level. but the main interface with users was a 24x80 terminal screen rather than a spreadsheet. Users from all countries felt that yyyymmdd failed the user-friendliness test, when looking at a date they would have to think what it really meant, and with a lot of dates on the screens, they felt ddmmmyy was far more intuitive. 28JAN24 was much more intuitive and instantly recognisable than 20240128, even for those whose native language was not english. The screen layout was very much led by users.
--kiloran
edit.... and 28JAN24 also used less screen space than 20240128, we wanted to cram as much useful info on each screen as possible