The format does not result in a three-digit month. What it results in is a
three-alphabetic character month.
Americans use m/d/yyyy as the format for their dates. Many other places use
d/m/yyyy. The problem arises with a date like January 12, 2009.
If an American writes a numeric date, then January 12, 2009 appears as
1/12/2009, which a European would interpret as December 1, 2009.
In order to avoid this, many places use a variation that displays the first
three letters of the month instead of digits. This is referred to as an
unambiguous short date format. Microsoft allows this. For example, in Excel,
if you custom format a date field as 'mmm-d-yyyy', then January 12, 2009 will
show as Jan-12-2009, thus avoiding the confusion. There are some variations,
depending on language (such as the month of May, which in French is 'Mai'),
but for the most part, it works well.
What I would like to do is to change the format of the date in the template
so that regardless of where the template is used, the format of the date is
consistent and unambiguous.
Hope this helps,
JoAnn Paules said:
Where do you live that you have 3 digits for the months? ;-)
--
JoAnn Paules
MVP Microsoft [Publisher]
Tech Editor for "Microsoft Publisher 2007 For Dummies"
Flavelle Ballem said:
All of the date picker formats in Word 2007 Templates use a format of
m/d/yyyy. I'd like to change this format to mmm-d-yyyy. How do I do this?
