handling incomplete dates

[David Thompson]

>Greetings,
>
>I'm converting a 16K-record Excel file, containing herbarium plant 
>collection data, to Panorama. One important piece of data is when a 
>specimen was collected, but not all specimens have complete dates, 
>i.e., sometimes they have the month and year but no day, sometimes 
>not even the month is known. This is more common with older 
>collections. The person who originally entered the data dealt with 
>this in a variety of ways ("0/4/32", "April 1932", etc.), all of 
>which is flagged as problematic data when I try to convert this 
>field to a date field. Makes sense, but even so, is there any way to 
>include partial dates in a date field?
>
>Thanks in advance,

No. A date in a date field is actually a number. Today's date for 
instance is 2454475. This is simply the number of days since a more 
or less arbitrarily chosen date that was 2454475 days ago. Any number 
is going to specify an exact day, so Panorama needs to know which day 
that should be before it can generate the proper number.

Dave