what are the correct date formats to use in word

[TF]

Depends what you mean by correct. It varies with purpose and what part of
the World you live in. Even then, the answer will be controversial.
Personally, I prefer to use

7 April 2005 or Friday 7 April 2005

when I am using it in a formal document or letter. If I use it in a list or
table, then I will often abbreviate the date to

7 Apr 05 or 7/4/05

Sometimes it is necessary to use an exact number of characters in databases
for instance, so it is necessary to input

07042005

One country reverses this though!

20050407



:

 

[Jay Freedman]

One country reverses this though!

20050407

Hi Terry,

It's not just one country -- with dates in YYYYMMDD format, alphanumeric
sorting produces the same order as date-value sorting. That's fairly useful
when typical old-as-dirt legacy software offers only alphanumeric sort.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I ran across a reference in the Chicago Manual of Style that clarified this:
apparently it's an ISO standard (or suggestion)--nothing to do with the USA,
BTW, though we're often maligned as the source of this horror in
AutoComplete.

 

[Geoff Oakes]

It's ISO 8601 - there are many web sites with further details, for example
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Thanks for the follow-up.

 

[Stan Brown]

I ran across a reference in the Chicago Manual of Style that clarified this:
apparently it's an ISO standard (or suggestion)--nothing to do with the USA,
BTW, though we're often maligned as the source of this horror in
AutoComplete.

An excellent summay is at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Yes, Geoff Oakes already posted that link earlier in this thread. Very
interesting reading.