Date Formats

Date formats can be used on input (for the DATA and STORE instructions) to decode date information in string form or on output (with the COPY instruction or the %DATELABEL function) to convert an entry number into a particular date format. Note that this is not designed to handle descriptive date information like 15 January 2025. "Human readable" dates such as that are rarely actually used in data—in spreadsheets, there is usually a single numeric value which that text represents and RATS is able to interpret that number combined with the fact that it is displayed as a date.

Different cultures use different orders for the components of a date, and different delimiters between the components. On input, RATS assumes the components are in the order year, month, day or year, period and allows a wide variety of delimiters (: - / . Q M or P). If you have anything else, you can use the DATEFORM option to let RATS know how to interpret the date string. In the date format string, use y for positions with the year, m for position with the month and d for positions with the day. For two part dates (for quarterly or monthly data) you can also use q or p in place of m. Examples are "mm/dd/yyyy" and "yyyymmdd". For input, RATS will also permit just single characters with delimiters, such as "m/d/y" where the single m, d and y represent any number of digits that is, it can handle both "3/5/2025" and "12/31/2024".

If you use the Data Wizard, RATS will guess the date format (usually correctly), but will give you options in case this is wrong.