On 18/08/2013 18:33, Richard Smith wrote: > On 18/08/13 17:05, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: > >> What does the house think (about the suggestion we try to stop using >> just one month to indicate a quarter)? > > I think it's a very good suggestion. Personally, I use '1891-Q2' in my > database (the format being similar to '1891-06-21', which is the > internal date format), and convert it to 'Q2 1891' when displaying it in > a report. > > And while we're on the subject of ambiguous dates, let me mention > another one that causes needless confusion. I often see a decade > referred to as, say, the 1920s. That causes problems for the first > decade of each century. Does the 1900s refer to a decade or a century? > The Ancestry interface suffers from that ambiguity when filtering > censuses. Personally, I use 19xx or 190x. > 1900s plural is the decade, just as 1920s plural is the decade. -- Graeme Wall This account not read, substitute trains for rail. Railway Miscellany at <http://www.greywall.demon.co.uk/rail>

On 18/08/13 20:24, Graeme Wall wrote: > 1900s plural is the decade, just as 1920s plural is the decade. You may use that convention, but a lot of people do use 1900s to mean the century, so the ambiguity is still there. Richard