MANNER OF WRITING OF DATES- DDMMYYYY MANNER CAN BE ADOPTED BY ALL FOR STANDARDISATION AND EASE OF DATING AND DATA ENTRY AND PROCESSING.

[DEVKUMAR KOTHARI]

Various manners of writing dates:

We find various methods and manners of  writing dates in documents, letters, orders, order sheets, notices, cheques and bank drafts, bankers cheques and pay orders , books of account, diaries, account statements, computer generated reports, and even on computers and mobile phones.

In computers and mobiles phones we have options of manner of display of dates and we can choose and change such manners.

Sometimes days are expressed on single or double number. For 1-9 applying short cut single number can be used or tow numbers can be used by putting 0 before the number of day. From 10-31 obviously two numbers will be used.

In some styles placement of day, month and year are changed.

Some example of manner of putting dates say for 1^st January 2019:

01012019	Method suggested by author.
1st January,2019
1st January,19
January 1,19
January 1, 2019
2019 January 1
2019 January 01
2019/01/01
1/1/19
1/1/2019
01/01/2019
1/1	Without year. Below  many  signature and initials and short form of signature we find such mention.

Expression of day and month in two digits and year in four digits:

Author suggest this style and manner where first two digit means day of month, second two digits means number of month in series of 12 months running from January to December and last 4 digits is for the year.

In this style 1^st January 2019 will be written as        01012019

In this style 11^th January 2019  will be written like  11012019

In this style 1^st December 2019 will be written as     01122019

In this style 31^st December 2019 will be written as   31122019

Days and months will not require more than two digits.

Years – by use of four digits years long period up to 31129999 the same style can be used.

Problem like Y2k will arise after 31^st December 9999 on 010110000

In computers we faced problem because earlier two digits were used for expressing year and from 1901 to 1999 year was expressed in two digits 01 to 99. This was to reduce use of computer space, because at that time even use of two digits less in computers was a very meaning full exercise. Now-a-days space in computers is not much problem due to advance technology. However, data entry  requires more time if a separator is used in expressing date.  

By using four digits for year we will have problem long after on 010110000 when year will be of five digits.

There is long period available to fact that situation. Hopefully people will take timely action and at least 10 or  100   years before year 10000  begun, action will be taken to tackle possible problems for  mentioning  year in five digits.

Advantage of writing dates in DDMMYYY manner

Without use of separator between DD and MM and YYYY as in suggested manner time for data entry can be saved because at least two entry of dot, hyphen or slash will be avoided.

Computerized calculations can be made easy and faster. The software will read in manner of DDMMYYY and will be able to calculate number of days between two dates.

Let us start writing in DDMMYYYY manner and gradually this can be universal method of writing and expressing dates.

Discussions to this article

[Ganeshan Kalyani]

Nice thought that you have shared with us (readers). The date format should be same in every record. One of the way is o configure the computer with one single date format. Most of the people are using computer and when they will have to no other option then by default all will be using single date format.