There are 3 components to a date: year, month, and day. There are 6
possible orders for these 3 elements, of which 3 are in common use:
• USA: mo/da/yr, such as 03/01/2010 or Mar. 1, 2010
• Europe: da/mo/yr, such as 01/03/2010 or 1 Mar 2010 or 1 III 2010
• ISO: yr/mo/da, such as 2010/03/01 or 2010 Mar 1 or 20100301
I prefer the ISO standard and use it whenever possible. However, the
client's needs and desires trump my personal preferences, so
occasionally I'm faced with the necessity of converting dates from
one format to another.
The canonical method of doing this is to reset your computer's date
preferences, restart it to make sure they've taken effect, fire up
FMP, open up the file where the old-format dates are stored, save a
clone of it (which will automatically change the date fields to the
new format), quit FMP, change the date preferences back, restart the
computer, open up the cloned file, import the data from the old file,
and thereafter work with the new file.
I've gone thru this complicated process often enuf that I wasn't
looking forward to having to do it again for a new client, so I
decided to try something else. I duplicated a fairly simple file that
I'd created a couple of years ago that already had the desired date
formats, opened it, and imported the old-date-format table into it.
Voilá! It transferred perfectly, and all the dates had the desired
new format. Then all I had to do was discard the tables I'd inherited
in the duplication process, and I was good to go.
Obviously this wouldn't pay dividends if you had also invested a lot
of time building value lists, layouts, scripts, etc. in your old-date-
format file. To preserve those, you're stuck with going the clone-and-
restart route. But if all you're dealing with is a super-simple file
that contains mainly data, this shortcut might prove to be a time-
saver for you.
PS: You'll notice that I don't even acknowledge the possibility that
some idiot would still be using 2-digit years, like 03/01/10,
01/03/10, or 10/03/01 — formats so ambiguous that your computer
should be wired to give you a mild electrical shock every time you
try to use one.
