Date/Time Formats
Contents
Just about every country and region has a different way of formatting dates. Some
use dd/mm/yyyy (day/month/year) while others use mm/dd/yy (month/day/year).
Generally your computer is set to the format that your region uses. Another
thing that is different from reion to reion is the separator (in the case above it is a ForwardSlash
(You can verify this by opening the Control Panel and running the Regional
Settings applet, and looking at the Date tab.)
Due to the complexity that this causes for programmers working with dates in their
programs, follow these rules for setting the date and time system on your computer, and
you should have no problem running the program.
- For dates, use either one of these two formats : mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy
(Make sure you use 4 digits for the year
(lets be Y2K compliant)
- Do not use yyyy/mm/dd (year first) - the
program won't work.
- You can use whatever separator that is specified on your system (there should be no
problems)
- For times, there is less choice - you HAVE to use hh:mm:ss , AND they must be separated
by a colon.
- Use the 24 hour clock, ie. 01:00:00 for 1 AM and 13:00:00 for 1 PM
The picture below shows the Date Tab in the Regional Settings Applet. The system
date is displayed as month/day/year. When creating/editing events in the CountDown
program, the same format would have to be used.

(Note: If you change the format of the dat in the
Control Panel Applet while the CounDown program is running, you will have to close and
restart the CountDown program for the changes to take effect.)
- You can change the format by changing the Short date style , or by
selecting one of the other formats in the drop down box.
- Also you can change the separator by typing in a new one. (Although it's best to
leave it as a forward slash, you could probably use any non-aplhanumeric character.
- When you are creating or editing an event, the input box for the date is limited to 10
characters
- Unfortunatly, you are restricted to the type of time format you can use with the
CountDown program. The time MUST, MUST, MUST be in the format hh:mm:ss
with a colon separating the units.
- When you are creating or editing an event, the input box for the time is limited to 10
characters.
- When typing in the digits, if you want to set the time to say 1 minute past 1 AM, type
it in as follows: 01:01:00 - (don't type it in as 1:1:0
)