Giving Access a Year 2000 Facelift

Many of the new features of Access 2000 are cosmetic and have little, if any, affect on the everyday lives of Access users and developers. Some features appear to be intended solely to expand the "new features list" that accompanies every upgrade of every publishers' productivity software. The following sections describe new Access 2000 features that are of lesser significance.

Four-Digit Year Option Settings

Microsoft has added Year 2000 (Y2K) compliance features to all Office 2000 applications. The General Page of Access 2000's Options dialog, which you open by choosing Tools, Options, has a new Use Four-Digit Year Formatting frame with two check boxes—This Database and All Databases (see Figure 1.13). Marking either check box changes Date/Time field formatting as shown in Table 1.1. Long Date and Time formats don't change; the formatting shown in the Access 2000 Default column is based on the standard Windows Short Date format, m/d/yy.