Universal Date Setting for Date fields

Jeannette Lindsay

Can a Universal Date Setting be added to Smartsheet settings please?

Richard Rymill SBP

Jeannette

are you wanting the dates to be read in a particular way for all users, eg 21/04/16? because users in different countries cansee the date in the way their country typically reads dates, eg USA would read 04/21/16. Is that what you mean, because each user can choose. If not what do you mean? 

RichardR

Jeannette Lindsay

Hi Richard,

For example, when you create a form, the date format follows the setting of the user who created it. So the date 06/02/16 could be interpreted as June 2, 2016 or Feb 6, 2016. I think the only way to clearly distinigush the date is to translate the month from number to text so instead of 06 use June.

Richard Rymill SBP

Hi Jeannette, that is a very good point you raise and I think you are right, you could run a frmula to convert the date to plain text. 

However if the person taking action on data inbound from a Smartform, can click on the date, a calendar opens showing the date in calendar view, so that should clarify ambiguous dates like the example. See Graphic which you can see in Report form as well as a Sheet.

Always nice to keep things as simple as possible?  

J. Craig Williams

 

Jeannette,

 

A woman after my heart.

I prefer to use ISO 8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 whenever I can.

 

Are you saying the Report keeps the date formatting from the creator, even when viewed by someone with different formatting rules?

 

Converting to text also will lose functionality like adding 2 days to the result or finding out how many days you have (date - today()).

 

Craig

 

Dave D

Jeannette, date format/setting will be based on YOUR settings - NOT the settings of who entered the date. 

 

If you have your date format set to DD/MM/YY this is how you will see ALL dates, regardless of the date settings of who entered the date. 

 

Just remember what you set your format to be and you wont have to wonder if its June 2 or Feb 6.

 

Account > Personal Settings > Location (Language)

 

That being said if your concern is a entering data in a web form, clicking on the calendar in a date field brings up the month. Once the data is in the sheet, you will see the format based on your settings 

Jeannette Lindsay

Thank you all for your comments!

I think I will need to use J. Craig Williams suggestion of using ISO 8601. The issue is that I work with people in the US, Europe, etc. so whether I set it to Euro format or US format, there will always be people reading the date different which is why universal date setting would be nice. Instead I will just edit the field name to include the date format.