Are there locales or common programs that use YYYY-DD-MM as the date format?

Question

I've often standardized on YYYY-MM-DD as the date format for communicating within a geographically distributed project teams to dispel any ambiguity that might arise from local date formats. Is it likely that I might run into people who are used to seeing dates as YYYY-DD-MM? Are there programs that use this as a date format?

Answer 1

There are none in the list of cultures in Windows that default to YYYY-DD-MM, so I would say you are pretty safe, in general, however since you can customize the dates, you should probably support it, if you want to be sure.

Answer 2

If you want to see exactly how daunting a task this is, look at all of the date formats available in Microsoft Excel 2007.

Answer 3

See this very useful list on Wikipedia on the topic - it lists the countries by date/time format:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#List_of_the_world_locations_by_date_format_in_use

Doesn't look at first glance that anyone would be using YYYY-DD-MM regularly.

Answer 4

You should try to get your team(s) to standardize on [ISO 8601][1] formatting, or use it and tell everyone that's what you're using. Or see this reference.

[1]: http://www.iso.org/iso/support/faqs/faqs_widely_used_standards/widely_used_standards_other/date_and_time_format.htm/"ISO 8601"