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#1
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Day and Month fields swapped on one PC only?
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 |
#2
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Day and Month fields swapped on one PC only?
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/cindy...r/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" wrote in message ... 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 |
#3
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Day and Month fields swapped on one PC only?
"Doug Robbins - Word MVP" wrote:
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/cindy...r/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. |
#4
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Day and Month fields swapped on one PC only?
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 My web site www.gmayor.com Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org yanqndo wrote: "Doug Robbins - Word MVP" wrote: 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/cindy...r/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. |
#5
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Day and Month fields swapped on one PC only?
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 "yanqndo" wrote in message ... "Doug Robbins - Word MVP" wrote: 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/cindy...r/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. |