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[Gl3nn]

When entering a date of 1/1/1895, MC changes it to 1/2/1895.  Several other 18-- dates are the same.

[bunglemebaby]

That is certainly odd. Just out of curiosity... how many files from the 1800's do you have in your collection?? 

[Gl3nn]

Only takes 1 to be a bug!

Old photos I'm cataloging.  Somehow, it's not quite New Year's Day on 1/2... 

[Alex B]

Unfortunately, that is not possible. Only the standard date fields have this conversion logic. Internally MC uses always this "seconds since January 1st, 1970" system.

Is this still the case? If so, I understand the need to have the day and month filled in (usually as "1") as you need to generate a single number in seconds since 1/1/1970
If not, ideally I'd like to be able to just enter the information I actually know (ie JUST the year or JUST the year & month)

That system is used with the Date Imported, Date Modified and Date Created fields. The Date field is stored in the following format.

The Date field seems to be a day counter.

- the number 1 represents December 31st, 1899
- the current date is 39124 (February 11th, 2007)
- December 30th, 1899 would be zero but that is not possible with the used logic and MC doesn't accept this value.
- December 29th, 1899 and older dates use negative numbers starting from -1
- if only the year number is inserted in the Date field MC stores the date as January 1st of that year.


I tried to find a reason for the odd looking December 31th, 1899 date. Why isn't it January 1st, 1900? Looks like this is the explanation:

And finally, why 30 December 1899? Why not, say, 31 December 1899, or 1 January 1900 as the zero day? Actually, it turns out that this is to work around a bug in Lotus 1-2-3! The details are lost in the mists of time, but apparently Lotus 1-2-3 used this date format but their devs forgot that 1900 was not a leap year. Microsoft fixed this bug by moving day one back one day.

That blog explains some other date related oddities too.

The numbers after the dot are just digits after the decimal point. For example,
37808.5 results 7/6/2003 12:00 PM  and  39232.618055555555 results 5/30/2007 2:50 PM

I have not tested this again, but I assume that also this bug still exists (the line in red), i.e. "December 30, 1899" does not work.

[Alex B]

I just tested the above mentioned dates and I can reproduce both problems on MC16 and MC17.

January 1, 1895 changes to January 2, 1895 and December 30, 1899 just clears the date field value.

EDIT

Also the hours and minutes do not seem to work at all when the internal date code has a negative value. The typed hour and minute values do not stick. Starting from December 31, 1899, 00:01 AM they work.

[Gl3nn]

Thanks, Alex.  Seems like the issue's been around for awhile.

Any chance for a fix in v16?  Jim?  Matt?

[JimH]

Probably not in MC16.  We will only fix major bugs in MC16 now, if any are found.