Correcting date format in FileMaker files

[Partha]

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

[The Mad Jammer]

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

[David Faber]

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

[Steve T.]

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

[AlanB]

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