[R] Excel export date format

Jim Lemon jim at bitwrit.com.au
Sat Jul 9 01:31:38 CEST 2011


Hi folks,
I have been tormented for some time by Excel's habit of exporting dates 
to CSV files as mm/dd/yyyy format even if the dates are formatted 
dd/mm/yyyy in the display. What's worse, if there are dates that are of 
ambiguous (6/6/2011) and unambiguous (16/6/2011) format in the same 
column, Excel reformats the unambiguous dates and leaves the ambiguous 
ones as they were! Yesterday I discovered that if the dates are in 
international format (2011-6-6) Excel seems to export them as 
dd/mm/yyyy, and all correctly. As I suspect that there are a lot of R 
users who suffer from this, I thought I would pass on the info.

Jim



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