Who uses what date format?

Any analyst in there career has probably had various date formats waste more time than they care to remember. This is especially true when working for companies or using software that originate from North America, as they use the middle-endian date format (mm/dd/yyyy). I’ll save the debate on which date format is better for another time, but it got me thinking;

“how many people and countries in the world use each date format?”

So I gathered some data together and built the interactive dashboard below, to discover that middle-endian date formatting is only used by 4% of the world’s population and 3% of it’s counties! Just use the drop down to choose which date format you want to see and the dashboard will update automatically.

I hope this dashboard can help you convince your workmates that maybe middle-endian isn’t the way to go, especially if you want to appeal to anywhere else in the world that isn’t North America :)

Let me know if you know a good reason why middle-endian is still being used in the comments below, as I’m super curious as to why. Or if you’ve had any headaches trying to work around it.

Lastly, I couldn’t make a post about date formatting without referencing this XKCD comic.



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