Help with entering dates

[Guest]

PLease help me!
I am new to MS Office Access and am trying to enter as yet unknown dates in
an existing database. I have dates of, for example ?/3/04 or ?/?/01 which I
want to enter but despite all attempts at trying to understanding Help I
cannot resolve the problem. Surely there IS a way of entering an incomplete
date?
Thanks in advance!

 

[Douglas J Steele]

There's no way to enter an incomplete date into a Date/Time data type.
That's because under the covers, the value is stored as an 8 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 day. Only complete dates can be stored using that approach.

You'll either have to store your dates as text fields, or use separate Year,
Month and Day fields.

 

[Guest]

You can always store the date as January first or first of your month.

 

[Douglas J Steele]

Yes, but you'll have no way of knowing whether or not it's really supposed
to be Jan 1 or if it's an incomplete date, if that's important.