Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?

David W. Fenton wrote: > "Short date" is a format, not a data type. The date is still stored in > long form, and you can type in a 4-digit year. It just won't _display_ as > a 4-digit year. Unless it's an historical bibliography, there will be > little ambiguity for the viewer of date fields displayed with only 2 > digits for the years. > > Further, formats can be set in the table, but overridden in forms, reports > and queries. > > I just don't see what the problem is here in most cases. > What you said are all correct. 2-digit year display can be changed to 4-digit year display by simply set century on, however, the problem is the screen real estate. I have several screens that the data elements are packed together to fit in one screen. If I set century on, many date fields will overlay over the next field or go pass the right edge of the screen. To avoid this problem, the screen display has to be redesigned, which may or may not be possible (there just isn't enough room). So the year display is preferred to be left at 2-digit. Except birth dates, the dates we deal with are in previous and future 5 years, so a full 4-digit year is not really necessary. Without any modification, these 2-digit year would have problems with the year 2000 issue. We are currently adding a function call in the VALID of all date fields to call a convertion function to assign 2000 to years between 00 and 49, and 1900 to years between 50 and 99. We will need to modify the programs again around years 2045, but we will only need to modify the procedure to change the assignment values, and hopefully the programs are smarter by that time. Hank Liao Administrative Computing Services University of California, Irvine