>     Instead of 10-24-95 or 24 Oct 1994, why not 19951024.  Dates are then
>     numbers and can be searched with greater than (after), equal to (same
>     date), and less than (before) operators.  You can't do that easily
>     with mixed/embedded alphanumeric names and you can't do it if the
>     numeric date is written in day-month-year order, ie. 24101995 is
>     greater than 01012000, but it comes before the new millenium.
>

This also has the advantage of allowing use of partial dates, something I
can't get a date field to do.  Much of our earlier material lacks month or
month/day data.  If you use this system as text, it allows you to use some
suitable missing data symbol while still allowing sorting to as far as you
have data.  Thus 199510XX or, for clarity, 1995/10/XX will sort to year and
month (and place unknown days together).

Art

Arthur H. Harris
Laboratory for Environmental Biology
Centennial Museum
University of Texas at El Paso
El Paso, TX  79968-0519
USA
Fax (915) 747-5808
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