date format

[MW Giles]

Can I make one plea in the imperial/metric debate

A Spitfire does not have an 11.23 metre wingspan or 7.7 mm Browning machine guns

Equally a Fw190 does not have 0.79" cannon

Please would people use the units that applied at the time, if you want to put the equivalent in brackets afterwards to aid comparison that is fine

The other day I read that Mustangs were fitted with 340 litre drop tanks with no sign of US Gals anywhere and it hurt, it really hurt

Martin

[Richard T. Eger]

Dear Martin,

Beautiful! Or, in GB English: Brilliant!

Regards,
Richard

[vzlion]

Richard is right. This has been gone over before. Dates are confusing. With everyone using a data base of some sort I would have thought that a standard would have been established by now.

Having started using DOS dBase III before Windows was in existence I quickly found out that there was only one efficient way to sort dates, yymmdd.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect over the years there are numerous programs that sort dates in any format you can think of. But, that format has always worked for me. Best regards to all.
Walt

[Jim P.]

Mr. "Swamped with work" coming up for air - between changing positions within my medical facility and converting to a whole new HIS system because we were purchased by another hospital organization, I have been swamped with work - but that's my problem.

Anyway - I've been using MS Access for years (now at Access 2010). When setting up an Access table date field the format can be defined. In my case I set the format to 'Medium Date'. When I type something like 1-4-44 it will convert to 1-Apr-44 or if I type in 4-30-44 it also converts to 30-Apr-44, but in this last instance the first number has to be greater than 12. If not the program interprets the first number as the month. MS Access is only included with MS Office Pro I think.

Which leaves most MS Office users with Excel. Excel does allow for something similar within the definition of a column of cells, although since I don't use it except for exporting files, I'm not totally familiar all characteristics of date formatting within Excel (which I hate as far tabulating table data BTW - sorting is a pain in the a@@ for one major reason).

Bottom line is that if dates appear in a format such as '1-Apr-44' in any posts any confusion is totally eliminated. Just sayin' from my point of view.

[Nordpol54]

@ Jim P..

a very good point and it would be certainly comfortable for all. So I do agree with Your opinion.

Best Regards
Norbert