Europe Blog notes, “The only countries that do not share the European date format in fact are the US, Philippines, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, Canada and Belize.” Seems to me I discovered recently it’s a totally different 3-digit number in the UK. I’ve had a love/hate affair with this since my early twenties when I spent three years in France. The locale is what presets your Google Sheets date format based on your region. Besides… so much stuff is gets digitized when the original writer never intended it. The European, Asian, and American date orders are all internally consistent and therefore both equally logical and equally arbitrary. If you ask a Brit, the will tell you that the emergency number in the UK 999, and they’d be right. I’ve never had anyone even comment on it. In VBA Format Date function you have the option to either define your own format or use some of the MS Excel predefined format. I will grant you though that the American style is only 1/2 logical. No one has ever had any problem with that, and to the best of my knowledge computers understand it just fine! (I’ll get my coat…), With respect to this whole “Fourth of July” thing, I visited a website (http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/scan.htm) just to reassure myself that the original Declaration of Independence indeed uses the *July 4th, 1776* format, which it does. dated 4th July 1776”, The site explains the notation this way: “According to the National Archives, ‘While no one knows for certain who wrote it, it is known that early in its life, the large parchment document was rolled up for storage. Caesar? Select a blank cell that you want to put the converted result at, enter this formula =DATE (VALUE (RIGHT (C2,4)), VALUE (MID (C2,4,2)), VALUE (LEFT (C2,2))), drag fill handle down to apply this … There are two variants of the 12-hour clock used in spoken German regarding quarterly fractions of the current hour. For left driving UK I’ve heard/read (can’t cite) that if riding a horse and meeting another rider it was good to pass on the left of each other….so in case of attack/need for protection, one’s sword hand was closest to the passerby/antagonist….assuming right handed of course. ), If it’s so logical to PROceed from the smallest to the largest unit, why not also say and write the time in seconds/minutes/hours? The American and European methods are both brain dead. Monday Day, Year is another one that drove me nutz because the only was to sort data was to import it and then separate the date elements, move them to a hierarchal order Year Month day or day month year. ps. …I also prefer comma-free Brit correspondence style. Change ). November"). Of course, I also add the Hebrew date b/c that’s the way I roll. Quebec does that but two recent items from Feds have used (eg) oct 26, 2012. But also remember that, thanks to India and other former colonies, as many people drive on the left as well as on the right. To format a date in VBA we use the inbuilt FORMAT function itself, it takes input as the date format and returns the desired format required, the arguments required for this function are the expression itself and the format type.. Formatting of date & time are sensitive things in excel, and the same thing applied to VBA as well. How can I change the date format to the desired format? But in America, we mostly say “4th of July” rather than “July 4th”. “Are you going to Dave’s party on July the 8th?” Anyone who must sort a large number of files in chronological order quickly becomes a fan of the ISO 8601 standard (YYYYMMDD). However, leading zeros were allowed according to machine writing standards if they helped aligning dates. I told him in kilos “How much is that in old money?” he asked. Took a bit but you learn by error. Excel always fails when the date contains a combination that … Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it will change anytime soon. So today would be written as 2012.04.10. How do you sort dates? White and Strunk in Elements of Style urge use of the non-comma format for composition. I have always used the dd.mm.yy format as this is what I was taught in school, however, and somewhat bizarrely my father who is fast approaching telegram age uses the mm.dd.yy format and always has done. Your examples don’t really show anything. I came upon this topic after reading a covid-19 research paper referencing 07/02/2020 ….a future date according to my USA way of reading and writing dates. BTW – the Japanese use yyyy-mm-dd, the only non-technical use I’ve seen. The traditional all-numeric form of writing Gregorian dates in German is the little-endian day. Pingback: 24-Hour Clock | Not One-Off Britishisms. In my opinion, the U.K./European way looks cooler than the U.S. style; it also avoids having to use commas and decide whether to write 9 or 9th. The American format is only truly logical if you say dates the American way. In summary, the expiry date should be calculated from the date of release or in case the period between the date of production and the date of release exceeds 30 days, from the date … For example, a news presenter will refer to the “July 7th” bombings, not the “7th of July” or “7th July” bombings. The month is written in Roman numerals while the day is in Arabic numerals: 14.  VI. 1789 is 14 June 1789.”. Sensible! The countries of Europe had many different systems of weighing, measuring and distance. That’s a larf! And your argument doesn’t apply to the other examples. Thousands of high school and college students are no doubt writing MLA-formatted essays right now. Even if I manually key in the date 06/02/2019 it's automatically change to 02/06/2019 again. They got rid of shilling, fathoms and bushels already. I used to fly to America a lot. If you bring those dates as general or dates, excel will do its best to see anything that looks like a date as a date. I’ll gladly proclaim my ignorance about Napoleon’s influence on which side of the road to drive. I’m nearly 60 now. “Meet Me in St. Louis” in “The Family Stone”: a case of emotional larceny. Even though I live in the US the Euro & ISO formats are more logically organized. 2012-09-04 can ONLY mean the fourth of September, 2012. 10 April 2012 and 10 Apr 12 are the formats laid down in the British forces’ Defence Writing Guide – I suspect it’s a NATO standard. so 25jun16. You will know better than I do, but I think also, historically, there was some overlap between the US and European formats. But when I’ve already got data that is in the US format EG: 6/12/2019 and want to change it to 12/06/2019 there seems no way. One always relates to the next full hour, in other words, it names the fraction of the currently passing hour. I have prepared the plan with US date format (9/25/2017) but it has to be converted to european date format (25/9/2017). The use of a dot as a separator matches the convention of pronouncing the day and the month as an ordinal number, because ordinal numbers are written in German followed by a dot. Obvious: two horsemen approach on a road, equally suspicious of each other. European Date Format. Like seeing the temp was 20c and putting on a heavy sweater and coat thinking it would be cold. It is, in any case, getting more and more popular over here, as in this post from the web site Military.com: Ah, another holiday weekend approaches and I’m getting tons of mail asking “When will we get paid?”   Folks, payday is Tuesday, 15 November 2011.  You’ll get paid on Tuesday, or on Monday if your bank releases direct deposit pay funds early. Fortunately, there is one solution in the ISO-developed international date format. Thank goodness with unknowing wisdom the powers that be elected 11/11 to be Remembrance Day. European date vs. american date. There was even a letter this week to our local rag bemoaning the lack of anything formal…which there is and I believe its the ISO standard yyyy-mm-dd. I have been failed in my maths exam for substituting the one with the other. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. A little later, Napoleon consolidated this position by ordering the military to stay on the right side, even when out of the country, so that everyone who met the French army had to concede the way. The logic shifts (and logically so) depending on what is most relevant in terms of our daily work. We had a unified system of weights, measurement and distance. European Address Formats; Help and advice. Official EU documents still tend to use DD.MM.YYYY but one document specifies the use of ISO 8601: "Dates should be formatted by the following format: YYYY-MM-DD." I have some French colleagues who insert a comma between the day and month in European format, but not sure if that’s a personal quirk or a continental rule. Mainland China invariably writes 2016/01/06 since the past 60 years. Dezember 1991") continues to use the little-endian order and the ordinal-number dot for the day of the month. France did not. Remember, this is 2016. Personally, I love it. I have seen this on many paintings/drawings in museums, and here’s a passage from the Roman numeral entry in wikipedia, “In Central Europe, Italy, Russia, and in Bulgarian, Croatian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Serbian languages, mixed Roman and Arabic numerals are used to record dates (usually on tombstones, but also elsewhere, such as in formal letters and official documents). Therefore, you could not apply a date format. RELATED: How to Use Periods in Dates in Excel There is much more to be said but I’m trying to concentrate on the question! 112 is the European (or is that international?) When asked for my DofB, I say 23rd of the 5th, ’64. The problem is knowing which is which…uh oh. Also: the 12 April 2012 format is routinely used by American genealogists when they write; I know because my sister happens to be one. However, my personal style is to use decimals rather than slashes to separate the year, the month, and the day. The worst potential usability problems come when the date is written only with numbers as in the following usa, because the date's interpretation will be european from one clock to another. The Modern Language Association (MLA) format for academic writing in the humanities specifies that dates be given as day month year; today would be 20 September 2014. Especially in business communication, written or spoken, it is common to use week numbers with the abbreviation KW, standing for Kalenderwoche ("calendar week"), so that in German the last example would be expressed as "Wir erwarten die Lieferung in der 49. As for Fred, that’s nearly 300 years old and irrelevant.