Changing ShortDate format

[Steveman]

Hi,
Simple question. Is it possible to change the ShortDate variable format to be Month/YYYY? We only use the month of publication. I note that Control Panel/Regional settings can be changed for ShortDate format but these all include the day.

Alternatively, is there another way to populate a Month/YYYY format into a footer?

[RamonS]

As far as I know you can freely change the date format in the regional settings.

[NorthEast]

I've tried this before, and yes, as RamonS says, in the regional settings you can just enter your own date format, e.g. MM/YYYY.

It'll work for your Flare timestamps, but you'll probably find that format isn't that easy to live with in Windows, e.g. if you want to check a file's date in Explorer and it's just showing 07/2010.

[Steveman]

That seemed amost too easy. Given everything else is complicated I expected numerous code changes would be required. Thanks guys.

[Judith]

Changing the date format works fine - we do it all the time. It works in the help and pdf output targets, but it doesn't work for Word 2007. There is no work around that I can find, you have to open the doc in Word and edit the date.

[Steveman]

Thanks judith. I haven't actually created the output yet and I'm in Word 07, so we'll see how that works out.

[Judith]

Hi Steve,

FYI I reported this to MadCap support in October. This is an extract from the final email:

Dear Judith,


This seems to be a Microsoft Word issue. In Word, when you insert a date variable you have different formats to choose from, when you generate the output from Flare, Word "sees" the short-date variable and sets it's default setting (which is mm/dd/yy) Unfortunately, there is no setting that would by pass these settings in Flare. I have logged a bug/feature suggestion regarding this issue, hopefully it will be addressed in the next version of Flare.

Thank you,



Alvaro Mancero

I've moved to Flare 6.1 and Word 2010 - the problem is still there, but it is a Word issue - Microsoft changed the behaviour of their default date format at 2007 (I think it was 2007, it's a long time ago...).

[Steveman]

Thanks Judith. I've now discovered the same thing. Once I changed the Regional settings the short date appears correctly in Flare on the Page Layout, but when I build the output it reverts to the American date format of MM/DD/YYYY which is actually way worse for us down here in the Antipodes.

I may need to look at a different format for the date.

[RamonS]

Another fine example of developer arrogance from US companies. The rest of the world can order dates and count to 24....

[wclass]

I also reported a bug about the Short Date format last October, but I don't think it is a Word issue (seems we can't blame Word for all the woes in the world!). A bug was acknowledged, logged and sent to the Flare developers - there was also a bug logged for date issues under Vista (but I don't use that - I use XP with Windows 7 to test on).

As a workaround I use the Long Date variable in Word output and that works, but I want the whole date, not just the Month/Year.

I have my system short date set to "DD-MMM-YYYY" - which displays the date correctly here in Australia. In Word, when I insert a DATE variable it correctly picks up the short date format. In Flare, when I insert the short date variable, Flare calculates it using the correct format for Web help, but inserts a date with hard coded format for US style dates - "M/dd/yyyy".

As well as the bug report, I have put in a feature request to be able to choose a date format that is not based on my system date format. Might have to repeat these requests for V6.

[Judith]

Good idea, Margaret. I'll do the same. It's a complete pain looking at an event log that gives a date/time stamp of 10:03:24 July 2010 because I've set the date format to accomodate my Flare output. And I always forget to reset the date - it's worse than remembering to sign the in/out book used by the fire marshalls hehe.

Judith

[wclass]

The good news is that the short date format is now fixed for Word output in Flare v7.
But I'd still like to be able to format dates without having to rely on the system date format.