I am a long time Filemaker user, but I only recently started using it for my business. I am using a mailing list which has a field that contains a date in the form of 08272005, 10152005 etc. Even though I have defined the field containing this information a a date field, I cannot sort or search that field. If I try to search for all the 2005 dates in that field I get a message saying "the value of the field must be a valid date in the range of years 1 to 4000 and should look like "12/25/2003". Is there a way to convert from the format I have without slashes to that? Or make FM understand the format I have?

You cannot search for a Year (which is a number) by entering a Date field. This seems rather logical.

If you need the year apart for a search use the Year ( ) function and do the search on it.

If you are willing to convert your current data to a standard looking date then create a new date field and run a script to loop through each record:

Show All

Go To Record - first

Loop

Set Field[Your New Date Field, Left(Old Date;2) & "/" & Middle(Old Date;3;2) & "/" & Right(Old Date;4)

Go to next record (exit after last)

End Loop