About date fields

Creating a solution > About choosing a field type > About date fields

About date fields

Use date fields to store:

•dates you need to sort or search through

•dates used in calculation formulas or summary fields

Date fields can store values from January 1, 0001 to December 31, 4000.

Notes

•The separators in date fields and the order in which the date parts appear depend on the system formats set for the file and the display format for the field. For information on changing the display format for a field (for example, July 7, 2014 or 7/7/2014), see Specifying formats for date fields.

•New files and clones of existing files use the current operating system format for date formatting.

•To avoid confusion when using dates in FileMaker Pro, always use four-digit years. To make sure dates are always entered with four-digit years, see Defining field validation. For information on how FileMaker Pro handles dates with two-digit years, see Conversion of dates with two-digit years.

•FileMaker Pro stores dates as the number of days since January 1, 0001. Therefore you can calculate dates before or after a given date by subtracting or adding a number of days. For example, in a calculation field whose result is a date, the following formula calculates the date one week after the value in the DateStarted date field:

DateStarted + 7

You can also subtract one date from another to get the number of days between them. For example:

DateEnded - DateStarted