Entering dates with two-digit years

FileMaker Pro permits you to enter dates with two-digit years, such as 12/1/99 and 3/2/09. However, these dates are ambiguous because they do not specify the century; entering 5/6/53 could be in the year 1953, 2053, or the 53rd year in any other century.

Important When you enter dates with two-digit years into a date field, FileMaker Pro changes them to four-digit years using the method described below. This method may not change the two-digit year dates that you enter into the century that you expect, which may result in inaccurate date entries.

You should familiarize yourself with this method and, for date fields where inaccurate date changes are a possibility, take the following precautions to improve the accuracy of entered dates:

•Use the FileMaker Pro field validation option that requires entering four-digit year dates. An error message will appear when an attempted date entry contains a two-digit year. See Defining field validation.

Note This method is used for all forms of two-digit year date entry into FileMaker Pro, not just data entry into fields. For example, when two-year dates are imported into FileMaker Pro, these changes occur.

FileMaker Pro changes two-digit year dates into four-digit year dates based on the year in which the date is entered, always assuming that the four-digit year date should be in either the next 30 years or the preceding 70 years. The following table shows how two-digit year dates entered in three different years will be changed to four-digit years.

Two-digit year	In 2015, changes to	In 2019, changes to	In 2030, changes to
02	2002	2002	2002
19	2019	2019	2019
42	2042	2042	2042
43	2043	2043	2043
44	2044	2044	2044
45	2045	2045	2045
46	1946	2046	2046
47	1947	2047	2047
50	1950	1950	2050
76	1976	1976	1976
87	1987	1987	1987
95	1995	1995	1995

The following illustration depicts how this method is skewed. It assumes that any two-digit year you enter is more likely to be in the past than in the future.

Important This method is not used when you convert a FileMaker Pro file from a previous version to the current version of FileMaker Pro. FileMaker assumes that dates in older files constitute legacy data. Therefore, during file conversion, any two-digit year dates that exist in the old file convert to "19xx" (not the current century, but actually "19xx") in the converted file. If you have any concerns about two-digit year dates in older files, review and correct the data in a previous version of FileMaker Pro before converting the file to the current version. See Converting files from FileMaker Pro 11 and earlier.

•FileMaker recommends that you only enter dates into fields defined with the date field type. Don’t use text or numeric fields to store dates. FileMaker software is not intended to support dates in such fields.