american english - Date format in UK vs US - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
When Americans don’t understand European date format on an imported German product
American date format is logical. European date format is illogical.
How to get Excel to correctly recognize imported American dates, or convert them to European format?
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Although there are people who will sometimes say:
- Today is Thursday, the 24th of May, 2012.
There are also others who instead say the same thing this way:
- Today is Thursday, May 24th, 2012.
Certainly in the United States, the second way of mentioning a date is more common than the first. The long form sounds more formal to us, as in “on the Fourth of July” being more formal and long-winded than simply saying “on July 4th”.
It was pronouncing the month before the day out loud that gave to retaining that same original order when converted to digits: merely convert the month name to a natural number, and there you have your answer. What’s today’s date? It’s May 24th. Instead of writing May-24, we simply change the “May” to “5” and write 5-24 or ⁵⁄₂₄.
That way it follows the natural language order and so requires no mental gymnastics to switch things around when speaking the date aloud. Similarly “September 11th” gets written ⁹⁄₁₁, etc.
The full spoken form with the year, “May 24th, 2012”, then becomes the written shorthand “5/24/2012”, or often just “5/24/12”. “Christmas of 2001” can be, and somewhat annoying often is, written “12/25/1”, while “January 25th, 2012” becomes “1/25/12”.
This isn’t usually any sort of problem because of universal consensus on how to interpret such things in the United States. If you write day/month/year in America, you will not be understood. Although I myself prefer the ISO notation, normal people do not use it in their daily affairs.
It's very possible that the US inherited this from an outdated English format - much like the length unit, after Henry III's foot and which the English have left behind in favour of the more logical metric system.
One argument I've heard in favour of the American system of dating is that the numbers of months in a year is smaller than the number of days in a month which itself is smaller than the number of possible years. So you would have 12/31/2013, in ascending order. I don't really buy this argument, but OP might be interested in it anyway so here it is.
Meanwhile, in Northern Europe they've moved on to an opposite, descending date standard: year/month/day.
Hi Proficient N,
Thank you for reaching out. My name is Leo, a user just like you. I'd be happy to help you with your concern.
Your Excel is set to the default mm/dd/yyyy format. To change it to dd/mm/yyyy, you must select all the cells that contain your dates. Then, go to the Data tab > Text to columns > Delimited > Next > Uncheck all delimiters > Next > Date > DMY > Finish. Once done, check if the dates have changed to the format you want.
Your understanding and patience will be highly appreciated. I hope I provided a helpful solution regarding the issue! Let me know if you have any further questions. Be safe always!
Best Regards,
Leo
Hi Leo Marcha,
Thank you so much. Your reply helped me solve the problem.
My excel default setting is DD/MM/YYYY and the source data was in MM/DD/YYYY, so under the text-to-column I selected MDY and that worked correctly.