Year 2000 and Ability
There is no problem with any Ability product with respect to the Year 2000!
How you as the user deals with the year 2000 issue (e.g. do you want to always type in and display four digits for every year?) depends on what version of Ability you have:
Ability Office 98/2000
There are two issues of which you should be aware:
- Date format - in any Ability field (e.g. a spreadsheet cell or database column) that may contain either 20th and 21st Century dates, you should format the field to display four-digit years to avoid confusion.
- Date entry - you can enter dates using either two-digit years or four-digit years. Obviously with four-digit years, there's no ambiguity in century. Most people will be used to entering two-digit years, in which case Ability will assume you mean the 20th Century for all years later than and including 1930, and the 21st Century for all years below 1930. For example:
| Enter date as… | Ability understands you to mean… |
|---|---|
| 1/1/98 | 1/1/1998 |
| 1/1/10 | 1/1/2010 |
| 1/1/29 | 1/1/2029 |
| 1/1/30 | 1/1/1930 |
and of course... |
|
| 1/1/2030 | 1/1/2030 |
Ability 1.2 and Ability Plus 1.0, 2.0 & 3.0
Even our oldest products had year 2000 compatibility built-in from day one!
For example, start Ability, open a new spreadsheet and type +TODAY() - format the cell in whichever way you want (F4-Format-Date-Long): it will always work.
To enter a 21st Century date, you always need to type the full, four digit year.
Note: In Ability Plus 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, you can alter the default date display of Ability to show a 4 digit century as follows:
- Select F2-Ability-Library
- Set the "short date format" field to dd-mm-yyyy.
