Microsoft KB Archive/29177

= Microsoft Knowledge Base =

File: Using Dates Before January 1, 1904
Last reviewed: October 26, 1994

Article ID: Q29177

Summary:

Dates before January 1, 1904, cannot be entered or worked with in a Microsoft File date field because information in a date field is based on the Macintosh internal clock, which begins on January 1, 1904.

To work around this limitation, use a text field to hold date information before January 1, 1904.

More Information:

To correctly sort the dates, the data entered in the text field must be in the format &quot;yyyy/mm/dd&quot;. &quot;yyyy&quot; represents the year (always four digits), &quot;mm&quot; represents the month (always two digits), and &quot;dd&quot; represents the day of the month (always two digits).

For example, December 6, 1903, would be entered as &quot;1903/12/06&quot;. This format ensures a chronologically sorted order because a text field is sorted alphanumerically (that is, 1 sorts before 11, which sorts before 2, which sorts before 230, which sorts before 3).