Timelines

[ParisSangrene]

I was evaluating Visio for purchase. I was pretty excited about timelines until I realize that they only go back to 1901. Try any date earlier and the whole program comes crumbling down. Now I know that they designed this for business customers, but if they had just allowed dates even back to 1 AD those of us in education could have gotten some real use out of the program. And what about companies like Coca-Cola who might what to do a company evolution time line. They are out of luck too.

Any ideas for a work around?

[Neman]

Hi. The trick is to go back a few years in computer programming - use text fields to represent the dates rather than date fields. Place the year in a (minimum) four-character field, month in two-character, and the day in two-characters. The fields can then be combined like any normal text fields to create a date. For example:

YEAR & "-" & MONTH & "-" & DAY would produce
2001-09-11

To go earlier than 0 CE, create one more flag, perhaps a logical field or another text field, to store a binary value such as 0/1, +/-, or even CE/BCE.

While this method will work for any date you can imagine, its limitations are that you have to create your own date arithmetic functions.

Good luck!