Meeting the Year 2000 Challenge

How to Prepare for the Year 2000

To prepare your organization for the transition to the year 2000, you can take several steps to reduce potential errors and problems.

Educate and train users

You are better prepared for solving year 2000 problems when your users can recognize and respond to date-related issues. Educate users, and make sure to include anyone who uses macro languages such as Visual Basic® for Applications or date-dependent applications such as Microsoft Access.

Customize how dates are interpreted by Office 2000

By default, Microsoft Office 2000 interprets dates formatted with two digits for the year to be between 1930 and 2029. If this range is not appropriate for your organization, you can customize the setting for all Microsoft Windows 98 and Windows 2000 users in your organization.

To customize this setting, double-click the Regional Settings Properties icon in Control Panel, and then click the Date tab. In the When a two digit year is entered, interpret as a year between box, enter the range that you want to use.

When you customize this setting, the following value entry is added to the Windows registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International\Calendars
\TwodigitYearMax

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Set a four-digit short date format

After verifying that there are no conflicting date settings in any applications, set the system short date on users’ computers to represent the year with a four-digit format, rather than a two-digit format. To set the system short date, double-click the Regional Settings Properties icon in Control Panel, and then click the Date tab. In the Short date style box, select the date format you want.

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Establish clear guidelines for date formats

The date format is typically not a problem for Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint users. However, Microsoft Excel and Access users must comply with the four-digit year requirement. In particular, users must use a four-digit format to represent the year in applications that use dates in calculations.

Excel 2000 has two new date formats: m/d/yyyy and Mmm yyyy. To specify one of these new date formats, click Cells on the Format menu, click the Number tab, click Date, and then select the format you want in the Type box.

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Update existing files

Scan all existing files to see whether there are any potential problems with the way that dates are formatted. For example:

• In Excel workbooks, convert dates with a two-digit year to a four-digit year, and then confirm the accuracy of the conversion.
• After converting workbooks from Excel 95 or Excel 5.0 format to 97-2000 format, scan the workbooks to see whether they have functions that accept text dates with a two-digit year.

  The date algorithm in Excel 2000 is different from the one used in Excel 95 and Excel 5.0, so functions might produce different results from what they did in Excel 95 and Excel 5.0. (Text dates with a four-digit year and serial dates are not affected by the change in the algorithm.)

Toolbox   To expedite the task of scanning Excel workbooks for potential date format problems, you can use the Microsoft Excel Date Fix Wizard and the Microsoft Excel Date Migration Wizard. For information about installing these tools, see Excel File Recovery and Date Tools.

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See also

Many Excel 2000 and Excel 97 functions accept dates as arguments. For a complete list of these functions, see Date Arguments in Microsoft Excel Functions.

There are other ways that you can reduce your organization’s exposure to software problems related to the year 2000. For more information, see the Microsoft Year 2000 Resource Center Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/year2000/.