Best timestamp format for CSV/Excel?

Question

I\'m writing a CSV file. I need to write timestamps that are accurate at least to the second, and preferably to the millisecond. What\'s the best format for timestamps in

Answer 1

As for timezones. I have to store the UTC offset as seconds from UTC that way formulas in Excel/OpenOffice can eventually localize datetimes. I found this to be easier than storing any number that has a 0 in front of it. -0900 didn't parse well in any spreadsheet system and importing it was nearly impossible to train people to do.

Answer 2

"yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss.000" format does not work in all locales. For some (at least Danish) "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss,000" will work better.

Answer 3

For second accuracy, yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss should do the trick.

I believe Excel is not very good with fractions of a second (loses them when interacting with COM object IIRC).

Answer 4

I would guess that ISO-format is a good idea. (Wikipedia article, also with time info)

Answer 5

The earlier suggestion to use "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" is fine, though I believe Excel has much finer time resolution than that. I find this post rather credible (follow the thread and you'll see lots of arithmetic and experimenting with Excel), and if it's correct, you'll have your milliseconds. You can just tack on decimal places at the end, i.e. "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.000".

You should be aware that Excel may not necessarily format the data (without human intervention) in such a way that you will see all of that precision. On my computer at work, when I set up a CSV with "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.000" data (by hand using Notepad), I get "mm:ss.0" in the cell and "m/d/yyyy  hh:mm:ss AM/PM" in the formula bar.

For maximum information[1] conveyed in the cells without human intervention, you may want to split up your timestamp into a date portion and a time portion, with the time portion only to the second. It looks to me like Excel wants to give you at most three visible "levels" (where fractions of a second are their own level) in any given cell, and you want seven: years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions of a second.

Or, if you don't need the timestamp to be human-readable but you want it to be as accurate as possible, you might prefer just to store a big number (internally, Excel is just using the number of days, including fractional days, since an "epoch" date).

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[1]That is, numeric information. If you want to see as much information as possible but don't care about doing calculations with it, you could make up some format which Excel will definitely parse as a string, and thus leave alone; e.g. "yyyymmdd.hhmmss.000".