Reunion 12 - Problem with entry of French months

[G Bordeaux]

Reunion 12 will not take Avril (April) and insists on changing it to Ab. Other months it takes fine. I have asked this question before and have yet to get an answer.

[Gregg]

'Ab' and 'Av' both represent Hebrew dates, Reunion thinks that you want to enter the date in Hebrew.

If you want properly formatted dates that are readable in French, here are two options to consider...

- Go into the Dates Preferences and select an all numeric date format.

- Try installing the French localization of Reunion, found here: https://www.leisterpro.com/doc/v12/a...ltresource.php

[Bob White]

Another viewpoint is to not use abbreviations for month names -- in any language. Except where the software will only do numbers or only abbreviated months, I always type the month's full name. I figure if my work survives one hundred years after I'm gone, no matter what their native language is, as an example, that future person will be able to recognize "April" but may be road blocked by the abbreviation "Apr"...

[pforbes]

I have the same trouble with the French months. when copying and pasting dates, ie: Fév.., Avril, Mai, Juin, Juillet, Aout, Décembre. It's the second and third characters that are not recognized causing the off performance. I wish Reunion would recognize the french spelling and provide the English equivalents.
My other pet peeve is the use of dates written in the form 10/12/1890. Which is it? 10 Dec (non US users) or Oct 12 (US Users)? Argh!

[romad]

My other pet peeve is the use of dates written in the form 10/12/1890. Which is it? 10 Dec (non US users) or Oct 12 (US Users)? Argh!

FYI: DDMMYY is also used by members/former members of the US Armed Forces.

[eric.vanbeest]

Reunion understands numeric dates entered as according to the system's Language settings - even if they are not coordinated with how Reunion displays dates. So- it may be possible that you enter US style mmddyy dates while they are displayed normal ddmmyy style.

For my own part, I use numeric only date entry, according to the system Language setting, but display GEDOM style dd MMM yy to prevent ambiguity. I find it is faster to retyp numeric dates than to copy paste between applications.

[pforbes]

Thank you for your comments. Yes, it's the MM vs the MMM display that causes the most problems and dating errors. When someone puts out 10/12/year, what's the real date? 10 Dec or 12 Oct? Thats why I refuse to write dates in MM but in MMM. That error was just pointed out to the authors of a document describing a ship's manifest contents from 1666. That error put the arrival as 7/9/1666 which everyone reading it thought the voyage lasted three months. It was actually 9 July, 1666. Proof was in the arrival port documents dated in August!
Please be careful with your dating.

[Nic Maennling]

There is an international ISO ( go to iso.ch) convention for dates and it is YYY-MM-DD. Largest to smallest. Easy for computers to file in order. Why would anyone want an ambiguous date ? Any other date code is not "normal" !

Nic Maennling
Lanark, Canada

[Gregg]

Keep in mind that the display and editing format for all dates in your family file can be changed in the Date Preferences window.

So if you're editing in ISO or MM/DD/YYYY format - simply go into Date Preferences to choose a format more suitable for public consumption when you want to create a chart or report.

Note that GEDCOM will always export dates in the DD MMM YYYY format regardless of the display format selected in Date Preferences.

None of this applies to custom dates which will always be displayed and reported exactly how they were entered - but, there should never be many custom dates in a family file.

[Susan Cocker Hopkins]

I REALLY like the idea of year month day order for some reason. I've experimented changing to that format just now with one of my family files and it looks great.
I had already been using the same system for document file names where the type of document repeats.

[romad]

For something esoteric, there is the Julian Date format: YYYYDDD which is all numbers with the Dees running from 001 to 365 (366 in Leap Years like 2020). So today April 25, 2020 would be 2020116. Of course this is totally unusable for genealogy purposes.

[kyuck]

I really like yyyymmdd numerical entry because Excel doesn't recognize old dates as "Dates" anymore but will recognize this as a number and will sort correctly.

[Bob White]

I really like yyyymmdd numerical entry because Excel doesn't recognize old dates as "Dates" anymore but will recognize this as a number and will sort correctly.

Sounds like you might have the field where you put dates in Excel incorrectly formatted. (Or you have an ancient version of Excel.) Anyway, you should check to see how you have the date formatted.

[kyuck]

Sounds like you might have the field where you put dates in Excel incorrectly formatted. (Or you have an ancient version of Excel.) Anyway, you should check to see how you have the date formatted.

If you look on the Microsoft web site you will see that Excel does not recognize dates before 1 Jan 1900 and no formatting will change that. If you enter any date as old or older than 31 Dec 1899 it will be inputted as text and there is no way to change that. It can not be used in a calculation or can it be sorted with other dates. It will just be recognized as text and moved to the bottom of the sorted column. I have the latest version of Excel, 16.36 (20041300)

[romad]

I just tried Numbers and LibreOffice; I formatted the cell as a Date cell then entered July, 4, 1776 and it was accepted. I then looked at the cell formatting and it was still formatted as a date. What happens in Excel when you format a cell as a Date cell, then enter a pre 1899 date? Does the cell formatting change to a text cell?