Handling BC dates in Access

[Marie Lucie]

Hi,
Well that's the question. Is it possible in Access ? I'm trying to build a
database of historic facts and I don't see how to handle dates before year
0.
Any idea ? Or is it impossible ?
Thanks a lot

 

[Rick B]

I don't think it supports dates prior to 1899.

I would think you would need to use a numeric or text field.


Rick B

 

[Rick B]

Wow - It does take years older than that. Hmmmm.

 

[Brendan Reynolds]

The earliest date you can store in a Date/Time field is 1 January 100, so
you will not be able to store dates earlier than that in a Date/Time field.
You could store them in a text field. Doing things like finding the
difference between two dates will get more complicated. However, I don't
think there are many exact dates known from that era, are there?

 

[Ken Snell [MVP]]

Actually, you can use dates earlier than that:

?DateSerial(1800,1,1)
1/1/1800

?DateSerial(100,1,1)
1/1/100

Valid date values range from -647,434 (January 1, 100 A.D.) to 2,958,465
(December 31, 9999 A.D.). A date value of 0 represents December 30, 1899.
Microsoft Access stores dates prior to December 30, 1899 as negative
numbers.
See this Knowledge Base article for more information:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;130514

 

[Dirk Goldgar]

Hi,
Well that's the question. Is it possible in Access ? I'm trying to
build a database of historic facts and I don't see how to handle
dates before year 0.
Any idea ? Or is it impossible ?
Thanks a lot

The Date data type can only represent dates in the range 1 January 100
to 31 December 9999 -- a pretty big range, but it won't go BC.
(Incidentally, there is no year 0, is there?) So I think you're going
to have to set up your own combination of fields to represent your
dates. You'd have to give some thought to what sorts of dates you need
to store -- dates that are specific to month, day, and year, versus
dates that are only approximate to the year, or the month and year.

 

[Marie Lucie]

Thank you to both of you for your answers.

Indeed, exact dates are not very frequent. Using a text field is a good
idea. For the moment, I use a numeric field entering only the year (positive
or negative). But now arrives the bigger problem. I have made a PivotTable
view of my form in order to get something like a timeline and it looks not
too bad but impossible to have it formatted for good printing presentation -
or at least, I'm not able to find out a solution. That was the second
question I wanted to ask to the group, in a further stage, after having
solved the date problem. But well, no real solution for the BC dates as far
as I can understand.

Bye !

 

[Marie Lucie]

Thanks for the link ! Wow ... I'm not so intelligent in programming ... I'll
try to understand something ...
Marie

 

[John Vinson]

Hi,
Well that's the question. Is it possible in Access ? I'm trying to build a
database of historic facts and I don't see how to handle dates before year
0.
Any idea ? Or is it impossible ?
Thanks a lot

You could store dates Anno Conditae Romae or in the Jewish or Chinese
calendar... and translate using code. But as noted, 1/1/100 CE is the
earliest date in native date/time format.

John W. Vinson[MVP]