Day and Month fields swapped on one PC only?

[yanqndo]

Hi There,

I'm having what seems to be a common problem - date's switching formatting,
but with a twist.

An Access table stores dates in dd/mm/yyyy format, but word is displaying
the month as the day, and the day as the month. So if the Access field
stores "5/9/2006", then Word displays it as "May 9, 2006" (rather than
September 5, 2006 - which is what it should be). By the way, the field code
I'm using to do the switch is { MERGEFIELD "DatePayable" \@ "MMMM d, yyyy" }.

The twist however is that only one PC in the office is showing this error.
The other three PCs show the above date as "September 5, 2006". All 4 PCs
have exactly the same version of word and are all updated to the same level -
at operating system and application level (SP2 of office).

When I noticed that only one PC was mixing the day/month fields, my first
thought was that the problem must be with regional and date settings.
However I've compared a number of different settings on the PCs and they are
all the same - for instance...

1. Control Panel -> Regional & Language Options -> Date formats (via the
customise tab for the default language (i.e. the language is the same, and
the date formats are the same)

2. MSWord -> Options -> Compatibility & Measurement Units,

3. MS Access -> Tools -> Options -> International & Spelling

I don't know if it's relevant but the database is stored on a file server
that is separate from all the desktops.

Is there anywhere else I should be checking for the error? Or should I just
try reinstalling Word (or Office generally).

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

David

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Re-installing is unlikely to help.

See the "Dates: day/month reversed" item under the "Connection methods"
topic of the "Mail merge in Word 2002" section of fellow MVP Cindy
Meister's website at
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/MergFram.htm


--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[yanqndo]

Re-installing is unlikely to help.

See the "Dates: day/month reversed" item under the "Connection methods"
topic of the "Mail merge in Word 2002" section of fellow MVP Cindy
Meister's website at
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/MergFram.htm

Thanks for the suggestion, that page has some good information. However I'd
already looked at that, and the solution it offers isn't (totally) applicable
to me.

First, I'm already using switches to alter the format. The fact only one PC
out of 4 displays the date field incorrectly is weird and at the very least
suggests that field codes aren't the problem. Just a note of clarification
too - the word document and the database are both centrally stored on a file
server, so all 4 PCs are accessing the same document (rather than 4 copies of
an original).

Second, I could use the format function within access so that it passes the
date field as a string (text) rather than as a date. But I don't want to do
this for 3 reasons:
One - because in the word document I use switches to display the date in a
couple of different formats (long and short) and would thus have to alter the
query to spit out one date field for each format I needed.
Two - there are about 20 other queries and merge documents that we have set
up, so I'd have to make the changes (and add extra fields) in all of them.
Three - I don't know if there are other ways I might use the queries in the
future where I would need to do calculations with the date field. If I
format them as text the calculations become a lot more complex (if at all
possible).

I think I'll try a reinstallation first, but if that doesn't fix the
problem I might have to use the format() function within the queries anyway.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Are you sure the PCs are all patched to the same level? I seem to recall
that this issue was fixed by a Windows update?

--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP


<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>

 

[Peter Jamieson]

1. If there is a difference in the software configuration on your PCs, the
most likely place is the version of the MDAC/Jet OLEDB provider. I /think/
you can find that out by looking in the registry - my first guess would be
to look for a value "MDACVer.Version" then look in the next key down
(InstalledVersion) for the version number.

2. Another possibility is that four of your PCs are actually connecting
using OLEDB and the other one is connecting using ODBC (or vice versa). That
can happen because when Word tries to connect to Access, by default it first
tries OLEDB, then ODBC (and then DDE). of course that just pushes the
problem back one step - i.e. why is one machine doing /that/ differently? -
but the answer to that question would typically be that there is a
difference in the security environment.

Second, I could use the format function within access so that it passes
the
date field as a string (text) rather than as a date. But I don't want to
do
this for 3 reasons:
One - because in the word document I use switches to display the date in a
couple of different formats (long and short) and would thus have to alter
the
query to spit out one date field for each format I needed.
Two - there are about 20 other queries and merge documents that we have
set
up, so I'd have to make the changes (and add extra fields) in all of them.
Three - I don't know if there are other ways I might use the queries in
the
future where I would need to do calculations with the date field. If I
format them as text the calculations become a lot more complex (if at all
possible).

3. I wouldn't want to either. But some things that might make it a bit
easier for you to consider:

One - because in the word document I use switches to display the date in a
couple of different formats (long and short) and would thus have to alter
the
query to spit out one date field for each format I needed.

If you format your string as YYYY-MM-DD I /think/ you will still be able to
apply Word format switches successfully, and get the month and day the right
way around. You can also experiment with having three fields, YYYY, MM, DD.

Two - there are about 20 other queries and merge documents that we have
set
up, so I'd have to make the changes (and add extra fields) in all of them.

(Nothing I can do about that).

Three - I don't know if there are other ways I might use the queries in
the
future where I would need to do calculations with the date field. If I
format them as text the calculations become a lot more complex (if at all
possible).

Consider having queries that return the dates in more than one format. Word
cannot in any case calculate very well with dates, so you could probably
just use YYYY-MM-DD (for Word) and the original unaltered date format (for
everything else).

Peter Jamieson