organising things in date order on PC

Sooler

Use YYYY-MM-DD

"A summary of the international standard date and time notation by Markus Kuhn


International Standard ISO 8601 specifies numeric representations of date and time.
This standard notation helps to avoid confusion in international communication caused by the many different national notations and increases the portability of computer user interfaces.
In addition, these formats have several important advantages for computer usage compared to other traditional date and time notations.
The time notation described here is already the de-facto standard in almost all countries and the date notation is becoming increasingly popular."


See
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

Strider590

getmore4less wrote: »

the best way to sort chronologically is to use YYYYMMDDHHMMSS...

every sort there is gets it right without knowing they are dates.

This is the best way, it's also good practice to avoid using spaces in file names and don't use fullstops inside the file name, use - or _ instead.

I had an argument about this at a previous employer when my manager insisted we should use the format (example) "22nd of May 2014" for file names, which resulted in right mess and made automatic data extraction almost impossible. The guy was an arrogant imbecile.
You'd basically have all the 22nd of every month and every year bunched together, followed by the 23rd, it was ridiculous and sooooo hard to find the files you needed.

But hey I don't work there anymore and they can all stew in the mess they made for themselves.

esuhl

Strider590 wrote: »

... it's also good practice to avoid using spaces in file names and don't use fullstops inside the file name, use - or _ instead.

Really? Why would that be?

It's pretty easy to use quotation marks, or to use the escape character before a space.

Are there other reasons that make it "good practice"?

debitcardmayhem

esuhl wrote: »

Really? Why would that be?

It's pretty easy to use quotation marks, or to use the escape character before a space.

Are there other reasons that make it "good practice"?

regular expressions, full stop = 1 character , which escape character do you use \ ie in unix oh but that's delimiter for a directory in windows, also try making sense of """^^!!"^'" "\" oh and the wonderful windows hide extensions of known filetypes eg "file.txt.exe.jpg.docx\ pdf"

Strider590

esuhl wrote: »

Really? Why would that be?

It's pretty easy to use quotation marks, or to use the escape character before a space.

Are there other reasons that make it "good practice"?

To explain spaces, don't use them because if you ever hyperlink to that file the space will get converted to %20 (url encoding), which can cause issues depending on what your trying to do.

It's always best to use safe file names to ensure maximum future comparability.

getmore4less

The great thing about YYYYMM... (without any delimiter) is it works everywhere(as long as you keep them the same significance and don't mix say date only with date and time).

it works on directories (any platform) files(any platform) fields(any file format )

great your excel can sort a date but dump it to a CSV and you are stuffed.

Us oldies brought up on command lines realise the importance of sort and having good fields to sort on.

if you must delimit then "-" and "_" are probably best but they will mess up in some cases.

Gravedigger

I remember an article in one of the Sinclair magazines so many years ago, early 1980s, :-), where it was stated the only way to insert dates to get them in chronological order was yyyymmddhhss. I do think it was for my Speccy 2 or 3 which I was using for Open University at the time. Course, then there wasn't "Office" as such, it was a "Word" type program and a very basic spreadsheet.