At the end of July I published an article on date formatting. As expected, I received quite a bit of email about this. It always makes me laugh that I get more email from readers on what I feel are less important issues, such as date formatting and using one or two spaces after a period. In any event, I want to share three comments I received.

First, a few users told me that the ISO data format is more “world appropriate” and less anglocentric than my suggested format. I think that is a good comment. However, I still think that my suggested format is easier to read, which is usually what matters most. Most people can read and use the format because most people can read English. Perhaps I am wrong. Maybe I am being an arrogant pig about date formats!

Second, I think that my suggested format could be changed for the better, in some cases. One reader made the suggestion to always pad with zeros if the date includes single digits. For example, 7-July-2004 would become 07-July-2004. This helps maintain column formats and better handles alignment issues, especially if only three characters are used for the month (July is Jul, August is Aug, September is Sep, and so on). You could always keep the lengh at 11 characters.

Lastly, one colleague told me that he always used a year-month-day format (like the ISO format) with his own file names and folders. He puts this date in front of all file names, with this format, to make sorting work. This really makes sense for some people who like to sort information chronologically. In fact, I will investigate using this approach with my own files and folders.