European date formats default option

+1 of course ! It’s a long wait for European people

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Not only for Europeans, but for South Americans, and Latin Americans, and the rest of the world outside North America, I believe.

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I agree that this is more than a European date, I just used short hand.

Coda, when will you fix this as it’s really, really annoying. I just imported a spreadsheet and it doesn’t understand the dates so ‘translated’ them into US format. Likewise I’ve had to go through and change all the currency columns.

Other posts tend to get a response from Coda, where’s the one here saying that at least it is on their roadmap?

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It’s years that we requested better localization but they completely ignore us.
If you’re looking for a tool that does proper time and number format you can check Zenkit, albeit it is more limited in terms of features.

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No apologies for raising this again but I’ve just found that copying a table to post in text or spreadsheet also defaults to US format and Excel doesn’t know how to handle this.

Even if I change a Coda column to ISO format, eg 2020-07-25, it will paste in Excel in US format as 07/25/2020. This is more than just a bug, it causing problems, especially as Excel can’t convert it.

I am very disappointed at the lack of response from Coda on this issue.

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Hi @Jonathan_Richardson,

I understand your frustration (I really do).

In the meantime there are some workarounds (quite easy) that are useful especially in importing/exporting data with excel/Google sheet.

You can create an export view that - instead of the actual date column - it displays an explicitly text-converted column that contains what the destination would expect.

If for example the date format of the destination is European ("DD/MM/YYYY"), you can create a European Date column (with Text datatype) with the following formula:
Format("{2:00}/{1:00}/{3}", thisRow.[Your Date].Split("/")

Hopefully a more radical Date/Time handling will sort it once for all, but it’s a quick patch that does its job.

I hope it helps.
Cheers

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Thanks Frederico, I’ve since found that the easiest way is to use text to columns in Excel using this advice when pasting into Excel. Still a faff but hoping that Coda will fix this.

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Another bug/frustration (and I won’t stop posting these till my preferred date format is allowed…) is that in chart view if the X-axis is a date you can only have US date format, which makes it very confusing to read.

This is true even if the original column is in my selected date format.

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And another issue I just found. I’m not hunting these I swear.

If you Summarize a group of dates (in my case I used Min and Max to get start and end dates) it too goes to US format.

PS - I found this chart and I’m not surprised they used red to highlight the one exception :slight_smile: As others pointed out, this is not just a European date convention
image

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Hi @Jonathan_Richardson,
I know.
I worked so hard in date-time conversions in the financial area in my life that I guess I used all the possible workarounds.

I’m also pursuing my personal challenge to let the world adopting the International Fixed Calendar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar): do you want to support me? :upside_down_face:

One thing easier - and likely more sure - is that Coda will extend the date-time implementation: let’s be patient and we will celebrate! :calendar: :wink:

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I can get behind this but I’ve formed a splinter group to have the month start on Monday.

Ah I see what I’ve done there… oops

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Ahahahah :grin::grin::grin:
Good point!

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Don’t get me started, that’s next on my wishlist of calendar changes.

Who on earth starts the week on a Sunday other than vicars? Yet the Coda calendar starts on a Sunday.

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The same people who put the month first

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+1 for me too.

I diligently changed the format of EACH AND EVERY “Date” column, to ISO (yyyy-mm-dd), only to be thwarted by a bar chart, which displayed mm/dd/yyyy on the x-axis, and couldn’t be changed. Doh.

ps. While we’re here, talking default doc or profile date format, a default currency symbol would be very useful too.

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We definitely know dates are an issue and we know a lot of the world uses a different layout. We will be addressing this in the coming months. It’s a fairly in depth thing to tackle, so it’ll take some time, but we know it’s important and wanted.

This is just part of a company and product growing. Other options are not releasing Coda to the rest of the world until we get things up and running here, but that isn’t productive either. We know this is a priority and we’ll get there. I don’t have an ETA, but this is definitely a priority.

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A Canadian New Zealander here throwing in my hat for more date format options. I’m a ddmmyyyy or yyyymmdd kinda guy, and wish i could set that at the account level

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Codians of the world* unite, you have nothing to lose but your illogical date formats.

*except the bloody US of A

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You never did say why you didn’t just launch with ISO 8601 for date formats. Standards help avoid these kind of situations.

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There are a lot of reasons for things being built the way they are, from what code libraries are available and which ones fit in with our current code base to the fact that we’re a U.S. company and had to start with what our initial customers were using.

This is something we’re keeping an eye on and will be looking to work on at some point. It really is a pretty complex thing and will need to wait until we can dedicate engineering time to it. It’s not forgotten, we just happen to still be growing the product.