Calculating Dates

After a lot of searching of this forum, the knowledge base, and the help
files, I can't help but wonder

Why can't Word handle dates?

Why can't I ask a user for different date information and do calculations on
the input?

The short answer is that you can do this - if
http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/show...?Number=249902 doesn't give you any
ideas, tell us what you are trying to do.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


Karin wrote:
After a lot of searching of this forum, the knowledge base, and the
help files, I can't help but wonder

Why can't Word handle dates?

Why can't I ask a user for different date information and do
calculations on the input?

Graham,

I have two ask fields (LetterDate and YearEndDate). I want to change text
based on the dates:

If LetterDate is = YearEndDate "ending" "ended"

I can have the information entered in the ask fields in any format, but it
needs to be displayed as mmmm dd, yyyy (January 16, 2007) in the letter.

I'm not much of a programmer, but it doesn't seem like this should be so
difficult.

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

The short answer is that you can do this - if
http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/show...?Number=249902 doesn't give you any
ideas, tell us what you are trying to do.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


Karin wrote:
After a lot of searching of this forum, the knowledge base, and the
help files, I can't help but wonder

Why can't Word handle dates?

Why can't I ask a user for different date information and do
calculations on the input?

This was my reply to your message in another group - a good example IMO of
why it's not a good idea to post the same question separately to different
groups (in short: why do you imagine that your time is more valuable than
ours?):

The comparisons are text comparisons rather than date comparisons. To do a
date comparison you need the dates in YYYYMMDD format, so e.g.

{ IF { REF LetterDate \@YYYYMMDD } = { REF YearEndDate \@YYYYMMDD }
"ending" "ended" }

is more likely to do the trick. But of course it will only work if Word
recognises the texts as dates and converts them correctly.


Peter Jamieson



"Karin" wrote in message
...
Graham,

I have two ask fields (LetterDate and YearEndDate). I want to change text
based on the dates:

If LetterDate is = YearEndDate "ending" "ended"

I can have the information entered in the ask fields in any format, but it
needs to be displayed as mmmm dd, yyyy (January 16, 2007) in the letter.

I'm not much of a programmer, but it doesn't seem like this should be so
difficult.

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

The short answer is that you can do this - if
http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/show...?Number=249902 doesn't give you
any
ideas, tell us what you are trying to do.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


Karin wrote:
After a lot of searching of this forum, the knowledge base, and the
help files, I can't help but wonder

Why can't Word handle dates?

Why can't I ask a user for different date information and do
calculations on the input?

Peter,

I didn't start out asking the same question. The original question is why
can't word handle dates? I replied to Graham's question of what I wanted to
do.

I still want to know why Word doesn't have a date field that can be filled
in by a user and calculated. I'm clearly not the only one on this forum
wanting to manipulate date information.

Don't assign words or thoughts to me that aren't there. I don't imagine
you're more important than me!

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

This was my reply to your message in another group - a good example IMO of
why it's not a good idea to post the same question separately to different
groups (in short: why do you imagine that your time is more valuable than
ours?):

The comparisons are text comparisons rather than date comparisons. To do a
date comparison you need the dates in YYYYMMDD format, so e.g.

{ IF { REF LetterDate \@YYYYMMDD } = { REF YearEndDate \@YYYYMMDD }
"ending" "ended" }

is more likely to do the trick. But of course it will only work if Word
recognises the texts as dates and converts them correctly.


Peter Jamieson



"Karin" wrote in message
...
Graham,

I have two ask fields (LetterDate and YearEndDate). I want to change text
based on the dates:

If LetterDate is = YearEndDate "ending" "ended"

I can have the information entered in the ask fields in any format, but it
needs to be displayed as mmmm dd, yyyy (January 16, 2007) in the letter.

I'm not much of a programmer, but it doesn't seem like this should be so
difficult.

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

The short answer is that you can do this - if
http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/show...?Number=249902 doesn't give you
any
ideas, tell us what you are trying to do.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


Karin wrote:
After a lot of searching of this forum, the knowledge base, and the
help files, I can't help but wonder

Why can't Word handle dates?

Why can't I ask a user for different date information and do
calculations on the input?

Word is a word processor. If you want to do calculations use a spreadsheet.

--
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

"Karin" wrote in message
...
Peter,

I didn't start out asking the same question. The original question is why
can't word handle dates? I replied to Graham's question of what I wanted
to
do.

I still want to know why Word doesn't have a date field that can be filled
in by a user and calculated. I'm clearly not the only one on this forum
wanting to manipulate date information.

Don't assign words or thoughts to me that aren't there. I don't imagine
you're more important than me!

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

This was my reply to your message in another group - a good example IMO
of
why it's not a good idea to post the same question separately to
different
groups (in short: why do you imagine that your time is more valuable than
ours?):

The comparisons are text comparisons rather than date comparisons. To do
a
date comparison you need the dates in YYYYMMDD format, so e.g.

{ IF { REF LetterDate \@YYYYMMDD } = { REF YearEndDate \@YYYYMMDD }
"ending" "ended" }

is more likely to do the trick. But of course it will only work if Word
recognises the texts as dates and converts them correctly.


Peter Jamieson



"Karin" wrote in message
...
Graham,

I have two ask fields (LetterDate and YearEndDate). I want to change
text
based on the dates:

If LetterDate is = YearEndDate "ending" "ended"

I can have the information entered in the ask fields in any format, but
it
needs to be displayed as mmmm dd, yyyy (January 16, 2007) in the
letter.

I'm not much of a programmer, but it doesn't seem like this should be
so
difficult.

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

The short answer is that you can do this - if
http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/show...?Number=249902 doesn't give
you
any
ideas, tell us what you are trying to do.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


Karin wrote:
After a lot of searching of this forum, the knowledge base, and the
help files, I can't help but wonder

Why can't Word handle dates?

Why can't I ask a user for different date information and do
calculations on the input?

I don't imagine
you're more important than me!

Glad to hear it, and apologies if I misunderstood.

However, the reality is still as I said before - there is no technical
reason why Word couldn't do it, but Microsoft has chosen not to provide
thsoe facilities in the "field language," and only they know for sure why.
Any of us can certainly speculate, and I would do so for fun, but since it
doesn't actually result in any useful change it seems a bit of a waste of
time :-)

Peter Jamieson

"Karin" wrote in message
...
Peter,

I didn't start out asking the same question. The original question is why
can't word handle dates? I replied to Graham's question of what I wanted
to
do.

I still want to know why Word doesn't have a date field that can be filled
in by a user and calculated. I'm clearly not the only one on this forum
wanting to manipulate date information.

Don't assign words or thoughts to me that aren't there. I don't imagine
you're more important than me!

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

This was my reply to your message in another group - a good example IMO
of
why it's not a good idea to post the same question separately to
different
groups (in short: why do you imagine that your time is more valuable than
ours?):

The comparisons are text comparisons rather than date comparisons. To do
a
date comparison you need the dates in YYYYMMDD format, so e.g.

{ IF { REF LetterDate \@YYYYMMDD } = { REF YearEndDate \@YYYYMMDD }
"ending" "ended" }

is more likely to do the trick. But of course it will only work if Word
recognises the texts as dates and converts them correctly.


Peter Jamieson



"Karin" wrote in message
...
Graham,

I have two ask fields (LetterDate and YearEndDate). I want to change
text
based on the dates:

If LetterDate is = YearEndDate "ending" "ended"

I can have the information entered in the ask fields in any format, but
it
needs to be displayed as mmmm dd, yyyy (January 16, 2007) in the
letter.

I'm not much of a programmer, but it doesn't seem like this should be
so
difficult.

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

The short answer is that you can do this - if
http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/show...?Number=249902 doesn't give
you
any
ideas, tell us what you are trying to do.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


Karin wrote:
After a lot of searching of this forum, the knowledge base, and the
help files, I can't help but wonder

Why can't Word handle dates?

Why can't I ask a user for different date information and do
calculations on the input?

It does have a date field that can be calculated - Peter already showed you
how to do that, which is why I did not reply earlier. You have to set the
date format in the calculation but for that to work reliably the date
entered in the form field has to be a legitimate date. You can help that by
setting the field type to Date. Then

{ IF{Date1 \@ "yyyyMMdd" } {Date2 \@ "yyyyMMdd" } "Greater" "Less" }


There's more on this at http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org



Karin wrote:
Peter,

I didn't start out asking the same question. The original question
is why can't word handle dates? I replied to Graham's question of
what I wanted to do.

I still want to know why Word doesn't have a date field that can be
filled in by a user and calculated. I'm clearly not the only one on
this forum wanting to manipulate date information.

Don't assign words or thoughts to me that aren't there. I don't
imagine you're more important than me!

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

This was my reply to your message in another group - a good example
IMO of why it's not a good idea to post the same question separately
to different groups (in short: why do you imagine that your time is
more valuable than ours?):

The comparisons are text comparisons rather than date comparisons.
To do a date comparison you need the dates in YYYYMMDD format, so
e.g.

{ IF { REF LetterDate \@YYYYMMDD } = { REF YearEndDate \@YYYYMMDD }
"ending" "ended" }

is more likely to do the trick. But of course it will only work if
Word recognises the texts as dates and converts them correctly.


Peter Jamieson



"Karin" wrote in message
...
Graham,

I have two ask fields (LetterDate and YearEndDate). I want to
change text based on the dates:

If LetterDate is = YearEndDate "ending" "ended"

I can have the information entered in the ask fields in any format,
but it needs to be displayed as mmmm dd, yyyy (January 16, 2007) in
the letter.

I'm not much of a programmer, but it doesn't seem like this should
be so difficult.

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

The short answer is that you can do this - if
http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/show...?Number=249902 doesn't
give you any
ideas, tell us what you are trying to do.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


Karin wrote:
After a lot of searching of this forum, the knowledge base, and
the help files, I can't help but wonder

Why can't Word handle dates?

Why can't I ask a user for different date information and do
calculations on the input?

You would really have to ask Microsoft that question (the regular responders
in here are not MS employees).

The probable reason is that Microsoft sees no good commercial reason to
improve things in this area when demand for other facilities has
(presumably) been much stronger. There is no technical reason why Word could
not handle date entry and date calculations a lot better than it does. Of
course, there are non-trivial problems such as the impossibility of telling
what format a date is in - e.g. is 5/6/2007 6th May (cf. in the US) or 5th
June (cf. in the UK), and the difficulty of dealing with multilingual date
entry, but those problems can be dealt with in one way or another.

Peter Jamieson

"Karin" wrote in message
...
After a lot of searching of this forum, the knowledge base, and the help
files, I can't help but wonder

Why can't Word handle dates?

Why can't I ask a user for different date information and do calculations
on
the input?

It can with a little bit of VBA using the DateAdd(), DateDiff() functions
for example.

Or if you are a field masochist/afficionado like fellow MVP Macropod, you
can do it as shown at:

http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/show...?Number=249902


--
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

"Karin" wrote in message
...
After a lot of searching of this forum, the knowledge base, and the help
files, I can't help but wonder

Why can't Word handle dates?

Why can't I ask a user for different date information and do calculations
on
the input?