Hi,

While I was out of town, the server crashed, and the people in office recovered the files half on Macs & half on PCs without correcting the date format on the PCs.

Now, the files randomly have different date formats of MM-dd-yyyy or dd-MM-yyyy which is driving me crazy for my date sets and period based searches.

Does anyone know how I can set the date format of the file?

Thanks in advance, Partha

.............

PS: the "use system format" option still jumbles date searches when I use the

'date too text' option so that solution does not work

Don't know if this is still valuable or not but it seems that one of the date formats is correct and the other is not. I guess I would take the date format that was incorrect and deconstruct the field into it's separate components as calculated fields (i.e make the MM a separate field, DD a spearate field, YYYY a sparate field) and then reconstruct the date in the proper sequence using the reulting calculated fields.

The Mad Jammer

For FleMaker running on Windows, the date format uses four-digit year. On MacOSX, it uses a two-digit year.

Howdy, P! If you like MJ's suggestion of reformatting, you can also use Excel to do it for you by exporting to text and then using Excel to re-format the bad dates to the deisired format and then re-import your data... just disable modified date/time kinda stuff first if it matters.

As for FileMaker and date formats, I had thought FileMaker used whatever date format your particular machine's OS used, not a format for the file, per se. You can control date format appearance via your layouts, of course, but I'd think yor auto-enter creation/modification dates would not be a problem if all the db's are being served from the Server. The funky ones, you'll have to fix.

Hope this helps some, though...

--ST

I had a similar glitch years ago, and I delt with it by taking the unknown date format field and calling it rawDate. I then set up a calculated field (CorrectedDate), and within it setup a series of logical steps, if(right(rawDate,4)<99, rawdate+2000,rawDate)

I'm ad libbing on the exact syntax here, but I think you get the idea; use the power of FMP's logical to deduce what the format is, and should be.

Alan