You can enter year month day
071211
translates to
12/11/2007
or you can enter
12-11
translates to 12/11/2007
or you can enter
dec 11
translates to 12/11/2007
Rabbit Trail
This has nothing to do with the original poster... and I hope they don't take offense.
But...
Why in the name of all that is holy do we have a date system with mm-dd-yy makes no sense to me.
Check out all the other contries that use dd-mm-yy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date
And US in it's stubborness sticks to it's format of mm-dd-yy.
It's about as smart as the reason why we stick to U.S. customary units instead of the metric system.
As far as computers go... yymmdd makes the most sense as the date becomes a number that is sortable in a column.
But for human interaction, using the day first makes the most sense, because that is what changes the most, then the month, then the year.
It's like the odometer on the car.
When we display the odometer on the car its
hundreds, tens, digits
And it makes sense. Just like
year-month-date
What if for miles we used a system like:
tens-digits-hundreds
or mm-dd-yy
What we are used to seeing now is
345 miles
would be shown as
453
It's hard to get rid of something we are used to.
Not to mention all the keyboards having a qwerty layout.
Which was designed to slow people down because typewriters weren't fast enough and the keys kept jamming.
They were also designed for salesmen. So a salesmen without any typing skills could type out the word typewriter because it is all on the top row.
Now the keyboards are faster than a human can type, and everyone still uses qwerty because it's what we are used to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwerty