Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by arrrg on Friday August 07, 2020 @02:37AM (#24079011)

I agree with everything you are saying about sorting and I frequently use YYYY-MM-DD, however I do want to make one point: DD.MM.YYYY does make some human sense as a date format since the year is very rarely important (and if the year is actually important often the day is so unimportant that it can be left out), the month is sometimes important and the day is often the most relevant piece of information.

So for any kind of practical planning that day first order makes some sense, but I wouldn’t die on a hill for it.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by reportgunner on Friday August 07, 2020 @03:32AM (#24079305)

I see where you are coming from, but I would argue that if you omit a part, it's not a date anymore.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by owl57 on Friday August 07, 2020 @11:08AM (#24082656)

Yes! It's not the first time I posted a rant on the net and found myself guilty of the sin the very next day. This time, a web app of mine has big tables full of dates, and I didn't quickly figure out a way to show the full date without too much clutter. So, I used "dd.mm" and postponed a finer design till next year. Guess what, this UI element hasn't changed in the next three years and today I finally stumbled on a bunch of records which really can't be deduced from context.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by qubex on Friday August 07, 2020 @10:40AM (#24082352)

It’s a cultural thing: if I’m not mistaken the traditional Chinese system is Y-M-D and always has been.

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