SoftMaker.com

Hello,

I recently upgraded to Softmaker Office 2010 and for the most part really like the software. There is at least one compatibility issue in Planmaker that is a show stopper for me. I exchange Excel 2003 files with many users and within our organization we use a date standard of MM/DD/YYYY and have since the year 2000 "incident". So any Excel file will have this date format.

When opening one of them in Planmaker 2010 Rev 569, Planmaker changes the date format to DD/MM/YYYY and also inserts a 0 (zero) in the leading month first column in a single digit month. If I select all of the dates and change them to MM/DD/YYYY within Planmaker and select the "Don't show zero" checkbox and then save the file. Opening it in Excel and checking the format will still show leading zero's in single digit months, also the date format will be changed to "Custom" as seen in the attached screen captures.

This may seem like an insignificant issue, but it is very frustrating and actually stops me from using Planmaker in editing any files with dates in them (which are almost all of them). I have had a similiar issue posted in the Planmaker 2008 forum for over a year and a half.

http://www.softmaker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=87&t=6059

Although the issue isn't exactly the same, the basic underlying problem remains. If the date format were MM/DD/YY, Planmaker would open the files without changing the dates. Unfortunately as I mentioned earlier, we can't save files in this date format.

Can someone please look into fixing this issue? If you need further information, please let me know and I will try to provide it.

Thank you

Hello,

can you please attach a small example file or send it to forum (at) softmaker.de and refer to that thread? Thank you!

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Sven Leßmann
SoftMaker Software GmbH

As requested, attached is a small file that explains the issue in a textbox on the sheet. If you open the file first in Excel and check the format you can see that the format is set to (english MM/DD/YYYY).

Then open the file in Planmaker and check the format. It will be changed to DD/MM/YYYY with leading zero's in the month and days.

Thank you for your help

Ok, thanks. I asked our developers and will inform you here as soon as I have more information.

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Sven Leßmann
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Starting with Excel 2003 the regional settings (Start=>control panel) are used for the Date Format. We will improve this for future versions.

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Sven Leßmann
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Not sure if this matters or not, but see the screen capture of my regional settings...

Thank you for your assistance

I have found that if an Excel file date format is changed from *M/DD/YYYY to M/DD/YYYY that Planmaker will leave the date format alone when opening the file. What the asterisk does is tell Excel to use regional date changes in the file. If the asterisk is left off the format, excel ignores regional changes.

Unfortunately, the standard that is in place uses the asterisk format, so all Excel files that I am likely to open in Planmaker will have this problem. At least now I know that if I save a file without the asterisk format in Excel I will be able to edit it with Planmaker without the format changing for other Excel users when it is saved.

So the underlying problem remains the same.