date field transfer to Word

[Mike Wilson]

The date field in my form transfers a date and time to my date field in my Word template. How do I remove the time component?

[davej]

RE: date field transfer to Word

Mike,

Have you tried taking the character equivalent of the date
( DTOC ) and then transfer that to Word? That should transer just the date, not the time component.

Dave

[Steve Workings]

RE: date field transfer to Word

How are you making the "transfer"? I make date fields available to Word with no trouble, but I need to know what you're doing before I can help.

- Steve

[Mike Wilson]

RE: date field transfer to Word

I have a date field in table/form that I have set up as auto fill from the system date. I also have a date field for a date-of-birth. These both display only the date characters in the field. I have a Word template with those two fields in the template. When I engage the transfer of the record to Word, a date and a time display in both the date fields.

[Mike Wilson]

RE: date field transfer to Word

OK Dave,
How does one build the expression for DTOC? I have found what you describe in the Field Rules>Date Entry>Default rules, but I can't get the expression to be valid. Any hints?

[Tom Henkel]

RE: date field transfer to Word

Does the time component of your Word document come out as the transfer time?? if so, then it is a Word issue. You should check the format of your date field in Word. Alpha's date field, unless you specify otherwise, is just a date, not a date and time.

Tom

[Mike Wilson]

RE: date field transfer to Word

What shows up in Word is the correct date and a time which is always 12:00:00 AM. It doesn't matter which default is built into the Word template, this time stamp is always transferred. Now that I have fooled around with it enough, now I have 2 dates and 12:00:00 AM being transferred.

Frustration....

[French]

RE: date field transfer to Word

Alpha Five's dBase format file format holds date information as an integer value (no fractional protion to the number) calculated as a simple count of the number of days from a base date.

Microsoft's Access and Excel programs use a file format that utilize a floating point number to store time information combined with date information. Microsoft uses the integer portion of the floating point number to store the date in the same way as the dBase file format, but uses the fractional portion of the floating point number to store the time information.

It appears that when you transfer your date information, the integer sent by Alpha Five is being converted to a floating point number expected by Microsoft products, and you end up with a fractional portion of zeros appended, which would correspond to 12:00 am.

All that's left to do is to make Word suppress the time display and you should get where you want to be.

Right click on the field in word and select Toggle Field Codes from the popup menu. Then poke around in Word's help files for "Field Codes" and hunt down the options for Date fields. It takes a bit of digging, but you can provide what Microsoft calls a "Date-Time Picture" to format the Date/Time information the way you want. A date-time picture similar to this:
\@MM/dd/yyyy
should display the date as 04/04/2005 with no time information anywhere in evidence.

[French]

RE: date field transfer to Word

Sorry. I should have added that you'll need to right click on the field in Word again, select Toggle Field Codes, then right click on the field and select Update Field to see the results of your handiwork.

[Mike Wilson]

RE: date field transfer to Word

Paul,
Thanks so much for your efforts and expalantion. Interestingly, the transfer to Excel works fine. Somehow Word is not. There is no combination that seems to be working, and now I have 2 dates and 1 time stamp transferring. I erased all templates and started from scratch and it is still transfering 2 complete dates and 1 time. ouch! I'll keep trying....

[French]

RE: date field transfer to Word

There was a version of Word that had problems with import of numeric data into fields, even from Excel. I believe it was the XP version. You could take a number from Excel such as 8.25, and when you merged it into a field in Word, you got a long string of decimals that included the binary rounding errors that are normally hiden from view.

I don't know if any of the Office service packs ever fixed that bug, as those effected reverted back to the previous version of Office which didn't have the problem.

That doesn't help solve your problem, but it does point out the difficulty of trying to build a solution that works consistently across different versions of Word.

[French]

RE: date field transfer to Word

Mike,

What displays in Word when you Toggle Field Codes to display your field?

[Mike Wilson]

RE: date field transfer to Word

Paul,
You are the Master! It took some diddling but Mission Accomplished. I am back to only one date, and in the format that I need. I was trying to set these parameters in the systems area, but typing in the the code directly prior to the field in the document was the ticket. Thank you very much, sir!

Mike