Date format confusion!

I was frustrated recently while using Quicken and realizing that I hate the date format dd/mm/yy(yy), as it has no correlation as to how we would generally read out a date in English (at least in this area of Canada) - which would be month-day-year. I realized I had the same frustration when I had to order new cheques last year because the banks had to conform and standardize to allow for electronic scanning/reading of cheques rather than manual - this meant I had to write the date in the dd/mm/yyyy format rather than freehand however I liked as before. My preference, actually, when writing a date shorthand is for yyyy/mm/dd, and I really hate it when only 2 digits are used for the year. The 2-digit year isn't so much a problem for current dates as you can usually figure it out, but when you're working with birthdates that could have a multitude of different years (particularly when I had a lot of patients who had birth-years in the range similar to the days of the month, ie. 1910-1930, it could get very confusing). It also seemed that the various electronic medical records programs I used (i.e., for clinic charts) or electronic health records systems (i.e., at a regional or provincial level) had differing date formats and I could never remember what order to enter a birthdate in when I was faced with __/__/__ . I had a receipt misread recently as well, where someone thought the receipt was for Feb 11 when it was actually for Nov 2 - probably of no consequence, but I prefer everything to match up so that my records all make sense.

So, I wondered, what exactly *is* the standard supposed to be in Canada for writing dates? Trust Wikipedia to have some information - and interestingly enough, it would appear that we in Canada are just generally confused when it comes to date formatting. While apparently most of the world uses dd/mm/yy(yy) as a standard (including Canada - presumably for financial/banking uses), mm/dd/yy(yy) is used in the United States, Phillippines - and Canada; and yyyy/mm/dd is apparently the ISO 8601 standard used in a number of countries - including Canada. They note that "All 3 main types are used in Canada- in French and in English", and I don't see any such similar notation for any other country.

So, my confusion and frustration is explained - presumably in other countries everyone just always writes the date in the same format so they have no issues. I'll continue to use yyyy/mm/dd or write it out longhand as I feel these are the least confusing to interpret. LOL.