Microsoft Year 2000 Readiness Disclosure & Resource Center

Product Summary

Product: Office Small Business Edition Version: 97 Category: Compliant* Operating System: 32-Bit Win Language: German Release Date: 01 Nov 1996 Operational Range: - Prerequisites: Office 97 Service Release 2; Outlook 97 Year 2000 Software Update Product Dependencies: Product specific, see the links to product guides in the table below. Clock Dependencies: Product specific, see the links to product guides in the table below. Last Updated: 17 Aug 1999

Product Details

Product Maintenance: While Microsoft continues to recommend that customers install the most current Service Pack/Release for non-Year 2000 reasons, we understand that, for many reasons, this may not be possible. In order to aid our customers' Year 2000 efforts, Microsoft intends to maintain Office 97 Service Release 2 as compliant through January 1, 2001. Newer Service Packs are also to be maintained as compliant, and may include additional non-Year 2000 updates. This is intended to minimize the Year 2000 as a reason to upgrade. Operational Range for Data: Product specific, see the table below. The following table lists products in Office Small Business Edition 97, summarizes how they handle dates, and lists their operational ranges. For more information, see the links to specific product guides. Product name and link to product guide Summary of how product handles dates Operational range for data Compliance rating Excel 97 Dates are stored as numeric values and formatted according to one of several default formats, the most common being the system short date. If the system short date is a 2-digit format, even if the user enters a 4-digit year, it displays as 2 digits. To avoid this, users can change their system short date to a 4-digit format. 01 Jan 1900 through 31 Dec 9999 Compliant, with installation of Office 97 SR-2 Outlook 97 Dates are stored and manipulated as full dates (for example, March 15, 2005) and are displayed in 2- and 4-digit formats according to the format selected by the user. 01 Jan 1601 through 31 Dec 4500 Compliant, with installation of Office 97 SR-2 Publisher 97 The date/time timestamp is stored in seconds from January 1, 1970 (the standard time_t mechanism). This value is used to create a structure in memory that contains the month, day, and 4-digit year. The user can choose to display the date in a 2-digit format. The only conversion that takes place is trimming the 4-digit date to a 2-digit display format. System dependent Compliant Word 97 Dates are stored as simple text strings or as a 32-bit integer. The date is represented by a 4-digit year. Dates saved with versions of documents retain their 4-digit year designations regardless of display. 01 Jan 1900 through 31 Dec 2411 Compliant, with installation of Office 97 SR-2 Common date-handling across all Office programs: Except where noted by a product guide, Office programs get their Year 2000-related date information from core Office code The following information refers to the code that is shared between Office 97 documents. Please see the individual product guides for more information about specific products. Dates and times that are displayed or that can be queried by the user are obtained from the operating system date and time, stored as 4-digit-year dates, and displayed according to user settings in the operating system. Setup has no date sensitivity except in the file removal DLL. See "Testing guidelines and recommendations," below, for testing implications. For Direct Mail Manager In the few places that have dates, 4-digit years are used. Other than the current time/date for the list broker password, Direct Mail Manager stores the date of verification for each address in the standard Access/Jet date format. There is a field in which the user can enter either a 2- or 4-digit year, however no processing takes place. With installation of Office 97 Service Release 2, a 2-digit year date from the Dial-A-Zip process changes to 4 digits immediately after it is read. For Small Business Financial Manager Dates are imported into tables via Excel Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The user interface also allows the user to select a date (January 1999, for example) from a list. In pre-SR-2 versions of Small Business Financial Manager, when a string like "05-03" was passed to the VBA format function in an "mmmm yyyy" format, it could return an unexpected date (for example, May 1997). This issue is resolved in the SR-2 release by passing fully qualified dates like "05-2003" instead of 2-digit-year dates. Two-digit shortcut handling: Because file creation dates far in the future make little sense, the Advanced Find functionality uses a 10-year window from the current date to identify the appropriate century. Logic across individual programs within Office is designed to be appropriate for each program and can be found in the individual product guides. Common date usage errors: Data exchange between Office programs should avoid the use of plain text data. If necessary, plain text data should be saved and manipulated using the full 4-digit year. VBA and ODBC will correctly handle all Office date typed data. Text values that contain date data should be verified to ensure they contain the full 4-digit year. Data entered or imported into Office programs such as Word, which do not have data typing in the document format, will be treated as simple text. As a result, those programs should not be used to store dates that calculations are based on (except in the instance of document properties). Standard document properties can be consistently queried and used across all Office programs for date queries and calculations, both programmatically and through the user interface. For more information about common date usage errors in a specific program, see the product guide for that program. Testing guidelines and recommendations: In general, avoid testing in a production environment because side effects with other noncompliant products cannot be predicted. Interoperability testing across all Office products can be conducted safely. Offclean.dll--the only date-sensitive portion of Office setup--removes all templates except those installed in recent months. This does not affect Year 2000 compliance; however, it could affect Year 2000 testing because moving the system clock ahead to test could cause more templates to be removed than would be removed otherwise. For program-specific testing guidelines and recommendations, see the product guide for that program. Area Subarea Testing notes File Open/Save dialog box Importing data Document properties Document management features include File Open/Save bringing up the proper "OK to Replace?" confirmation dialog box when attempting to save a file after the date/time has been changed; display of dates in results pane of dialog; sorting of dates in results pane of the File Open/Save dialog box Find Fast Creation date of index Create an index with the date set to the year 2000. Click Index, create index, select the index mentioned, and then click Information. Ensure that the date shown says the year 2000 or 00, depending on the regional settings. Last modified date of index Have Find Fast set to update itself every 3 minutes. Set the system date to December 31, 1999, and have it roll over to the year 2000. Verify that the updating mechanism for Find Fast is not affected. Creation date of file Create a file created on January 1, 2000. Perform a search using an Office program for files created after December 30, 1999, and verify that the file was found. Last modified date of file Create a file last modified on January 1, 2000. Perform a search using an Office program for files last modified after December 30, 1999, and verify that the file was found. Last printed date of file Create a file last modified on January 1, 2000. Perform a search using an Office program for files last printed after December 30, 1999, and verify that the file was found. Custom date property Create a file with a custom date property of January 1, 2000. Perform a search using an Office program for files with that property set to a date later than December 30, 1999, and verify that the file was found. Leap year testing Repeat the five preceding tests, substituting February 29 and 28, 2000, 2001, and 2004, for the dates used. Log file Verify that the log file shows the year 00 for any logs in the year 2000. Displayed dates Verify that the displayed dates for the creation/last modified dates of the index show 00 for the year 2000. Setup Complete Install Maintenance Mode Remove All Complete Install is a superset of other options. It should be performed on clean machines and on machines with Office 97 installed, with all combinations of Complete Install, Maintenance Mode, and Remove All spanning the turn of the century.

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ANY MICROSOFT YEAR 2000 STATEMENTS MADE TO YOU IN THE COURSE OF PROVIDING YEAR 2000 RELATED UPDATES, YEAR 2000 DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS, OR REMEDIATION SERVICES (IF ANY) ARE SUBJECT TO THE YEAR 2000 INFORMATION AND READINESS DISCLOSURE ACT (112 STAT. 2386). IN CASE OF A DISPUTE, THIS ACT MAY REDUCE YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS REGARDING THE USE OF ANY SUCH STATEMENTS, UNLESS OTHERWISE SPECIFIED BY YOUR CONTRACT OR TARIFF.

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