Cemeteries: What form should the date in excel be?

Question

This question has to do with the excel table I am creating to be transformed into a sortable wiki on the cemetery free space page. The dates on markers are sometimes only the year, sometimes Jan. 1, 1999 and sometimes 1-1-1999. How should I enter this on my excel sheet?

Answer 1

The format I've been using (I edit the wiki directly rather than starting in Excel, but that shouldn't make a difference) is YYYY-MM-DD. If there's no day, then YYYY-MM, and if there's just a year, then just YYYY.

This has two big advantages:

1. It's international. The order of the month and day is unambiguous, unlike, say 1-2-1999, which could be January 2 or February 1 depending on where you're from.
2. It's sortable. If you sort the table by date, they will be properly sorted by date, since it will sort first by the year, then by the month, then by the day.

Comments

Can we just upload excel or csv files without using wikicode to edit them?

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I just answered your separate question related to this, but I'll reply here too. You can't upload an Excel or csv file directly to WikiTree. But, you could work with another project member to have it turned into a wiki table.

Answer 2

Excel typically stores dates in the yyyy-mm-dd format (i.e. 2014-09-18), but can display them any way you want.  And you can typically enter them in a recognizable date format (say, January, 2014) and it will figure out you're talking about a date.