Date Columns
Dates are an essential part of every business process; your database may contain due dates, delivery dates, payment dates, clients’ birthdates, and more.
Columns of the Date type include a calendar button that allows database users to choose a date, helping to avoid any other type of data entry.
The Date format is automatically defined and depends on the Language and location settings specified in a user profile. If a user doesn’t have a profile or if a notification with a Date column value is sent to a person who is not a database user, the Language and location settings specified in the database properties are used to determine the date format.
If a column contains data that doesn’t appear or behave as desired, you can edit the column’s General Properties and the properties defined by the column type.
General Properties
You can select the Today option in the General Properties, and today’s date value will be inserted by default into this Date field when a new record is created.
Date Options
Using Date column properties, you can change the date format according to your needs.
Below are descriptions of the properties defined by the column type.
- Format
- This property allows a user to specify the format in which the date value will be represented. The following options are possible:
- Short Date
- Long Date
- Month Day - month preceding day, for example, November 24
- Year Month - month preceding year, for example, January 2007
- Help
- When the Help text property is filled in, a question mark is displayed near the field name on the View/Edit form. Hovering over this question mark will show a pop-up with a tip or a help text message.