In reply to Jeff Portman.

:-) The millions of people in Europe would agree with you: that is the European standard! Although I live in the US, years of programming in SAS has caused me to write dates as DDMMMYYY, such as 17MAR2018, because that is a common SAS format. I must admit, however, that the mathematician in me prefers YYYYMMDD because then the chronological order matches the alphanumeric (dictionary) order.