Crystal Reports Administration: Date Formats

Date formats can become very confusing, very fast.

In the United States, many companies use the format MM/DD/YYYY. For example, they write 09/11/2001 and say "September 9, 2001." And it's become popular in the USA to refer to this date as "911."

What's interesting about this is the airlines use a different format. They use DD/MM/YYY. So does the military. So does most of the rest of the world.

Suppose you are communicating with someone who does business internationally and ask for an item to be delivered "on 03/09/2006." When can you expect that item to arrive? You may be thinking you are going to get it on March 9th. But, the other person reads this as 03 September.

What can you do to avoid problems? A commonly accepted solution is to use MMM to indicate the month. Three upper case letters in a date format means you are using a three-letter designation for the month. For example, 03SEP2006. There's no confusion as to what month you can expect delivery.

This method of mixing alpha and numeric solves a communication problem quite handily. But what about inside a database or spreadsheet, where you need to do calculations with dates? It's a bit hard to subtract FEB from NOV, now, isn't it? So how do you guarantee you are going to get the month and the day in the correct order?

In software--especially in databases, file systems, and spreadsheets, another format is fairly standard and it solves that problem. You'll also see this format in inventory systems and many other tabular style applications. That format is YYYY-MM-DD. A variation is YYYYMMDD.

So, it will look like this: 20060903. The largest unit (years) are on the left, and the smallest units (days) are on the right. Why not do it the other way? Well, you could. But what if you wanted to sort by date? Or perform a calculation that involved different months or years?

To avoid confusion:

• Use the YYYYMMDD format when working with data.
• Use the DDMMMYYYY format when working with information.
• Don't use the MMDDYYYY format at all.

To avoid related confusion:

• Always use four digits for the year, not two.
• Always provide a legend for a date mask, when you are forcing the format for data validation purposes.
• When providing a legend for a date mask, remember that lower case letters indicate hours, minutes, and seconds: YYYYMMDDhhmmss.

If you are using the 12-hour clock, you should consider going to a 24-hour time standard. This also avoids confusion, especially if you run a multishift or 24-hour operation.

For many people, changing date formats and clock formats is uncomfortable. So, they are loathe to do it. The more universal formats feel foreign to them. If you are one of these people, ask yourself if it's more important to communicate clearly or to avoid discomfort during a temporary adjustment period.

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