unknown dates

[Suzanne]

I am importing an existing database to Access. It is for a
cemetery. One of the fields is the date of burial. There
are 2000 records where the date of burial was not known,
so they used 00-00-0000. There are another 100 records
where only a year was known, so they used 00-00-yyyy. I
had to import the records as text so that I wouldn't lose
them, but in order to do queries and reports for certain
date ranges, I need to convert them to dates. But of
course when I try, I lose the records. Any suggestions?
This is the second time I have posted. I am hoping that
this time there is someone who can help.

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

Try importing them to a temporary table, with the date field as text, not a
Date. Add a date field to the table, and write some Update queries to
convert the text to a proper date. For unknown, my recommendation would be
to leave the date as Null. Where you only know the year, you'll have to
decide on what day and month you want to use, because a date must be
complete in Access.