Paritek Software Archive 14

Valid Date Entries

Do you ever have trouble remembering which month number August is? Do you get tired typing in all those numbers when you have to enter a date? Actually, you can use letters when you want to enter a date.

If you want to just type numbers, the program will only accept a year-month-day format. By using letters to represent the month, the program has a better chance of understanding differing date formats. It will accept both month-day-year and day-month-year formats. By a strange coincidence, it will not accept year-month-day formats using letters to represent the month. Be careful as a date like 02 oct 03 would be translated to October 2, 2003 not October 3, 2002.

Spaces are important to separate the day and year portion if you enter in the month-day-year format. For example, Oct1903 would translate as October 1, 1903 and not October 19, 2003. However, if you enter Oct19 03 (note the space), the program would understand the date as October 19, 2003. If you are using the day-month-year format, you can just run the entire date together as 19oct03.

Punctation and capitalization are ignored, so oct3 02, oct.3 02, OCT.3 02 and Oct.3, 2002 all translate to the same October 3, 2002 date.

If you choose to enter only the last two digits of the year, the program will assume the year to be between 80 years ago and 20 years ahead. For example, during 2002, the program will assume a two digit year to be between 1922 and 2021. If you want to be sure, you can enter the full four digit year.

Month Abbreviations
Months that have a unique first letter (February, September, October, November and December) can actually be abbreviated with that single letter. January, April and August can be abbreviated by their two letter code while the other months require at least three letters. If you do not feel like memorizing this entire list, you should probably just use the first three letters of the month.

Month	Valid Short Entries			Month	Valid Short Entries
January		ja	jan	July			jul
February	f	fe	feb	August		au	aug
March			mar	September	s	se	sep
April		ap	apr	October	o	oc	oct
May			may	November	n	no	nov
June			jun	December	d	de	dec

Regardless of which date format you use, if you enter an invalid date, the program will ignore your attempt to change the date. If there was a date in the field when you started entering, it will be restored. If the date field was blank, it will remain blank.

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