Dates are important. Some need to be remembered or you’re in big trouble at home! Same goes for the office, renewal expiry dates can be critical! But date formats? They are subjective.
YYYY-MM-DD
This is the ISO8601 standard. It’s easily sorted chronologically. Its clean and easily readable. However, this is not yet the standard format used by most people. While it makes for a more efficient sort process, some people just prefer their usual.
DD-MM-YYYY
This is the most common format used around the globe, albeit the delimiter can be different depending on the region. It’s not easily sorted thanks to the day being listed first. But it is represented linearly starting with the smallest unit of time, the day, working up to the larger unit, the year. This format is used by the vast majority of the Earth’s population (approx. 3.8bn).
MM-DD-YYYY
This format is used mainly in the USA. Again, not easily sorted due to the month being listed first. Also, if the day of the month is 12 or less, it can be very hard to determine which format is being used, this or the DD-MM-YYYY format.
What do we use in Support Renewals?
All dates used in Support Renewals are of the format YYYY-MM-DD. It’s the easiest for us to store and sort. Our CEO once asked if we could use the most common format (DD-MM-YYYY) instead and we pretty much said no, why would anyone want to use a different date?! Anyway, that was a few years ago now. We’ve grown a lot since then and some of our customers have asked the same thing our CEO did. And we like to listen to our customers (we’d be mad not to, right?!). Therefore, with some front-end adjustment, a few tweaks here, some code changes there, users can now change the displayed date format to one of the six options below…. But, we still prefer the “proper” format, YYYY-MM-DD. 😉
Your date format choices on Support Renewals
These are the choices available for displaying dates in your Support Renewals account.
- yyyy-mm-dd or yyyy/mm/dd
- dd-mm-yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy
- mm-dd-yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy
To change your format, follow the steps in our howto guide: Changing the date format.
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Refrences
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#EN_ISO_8601
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Europe
