date format - excluding year

[buggirl]

Hello again -

I'm having trouble entering dates without the year. I want to keep the year
in a separate column (so I can sort or filter by year). I know I should be
able to format it using dd-mmm, but as soon as I export it to Excel, 2009 is
automatically tagged on the end and the format becomes "custom" (rather than
date format).

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

buggirl

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

If you're using the Date data type, you must store year: there's no way
around that. That's because under the covers, a date is an eight-byte
floating point number, where the integer portion represents the date as the
number of days relative to 30 Dec, 1899, and the decimal portion represents
the time as a fraction of a day.

That having been said, there's nothing stopping you from sorting or
filtering by year. Create a query, and add a calculated field that uses the
Year function to extract only the year from the date. Use that query
wherever you would otherwise have used the table.

 

[buggirl]

Thank you very much - you confirmed exactly what I thought. I'll try
creating a query instead.

cheers,

buggirl