Internally, Hansa features full Year 2000 compatibility: all dates are stored with four-digit years (e.g. "2000"). If the Century check box is switched on, Hansa will display the century digits in all dates. However, you do not have to type the extra two century digits, they will be added automatically by Hansa. If you enter "100400" in a date field, Hansa will change it to "10-04-2000".

In the current version of Hansa, the Century check box must be checked for the long dates to appear in back-up and in Hansa's different Export files. If the box is not checked, all dates in the exported files will be written as short dates, without the century digits. This will create a problem if you later import a back-up or an export file containing dates from both centuries.

Our recommendation is always to check the Century box. This will make certain that your Hansa program will behave correctly, both internally and when you communicate with other applications.

Whenever a change is made to this setting, its effect will be immediate and universal, with one exception. A change to any of the separators will not affect the Autotransactions setting in the Nominal Ledger. All records in this setting will have to be changed manually.

In multi-user systems, the Date and Numeric Format setting is unusual in that any changes made to it from a client machine will not be saved in the database on the server. Therefore these changes will not affect the other clients. If you want to change the Date and Numeric Format setting on the server, you must either work on the server itself or log on from a client in "Admin Client" mode. Details about "Admin Client" mode can be found here.

Although it is possible to have date and numeric formats on a client that are different to those on the server, this is not usually recommended. If the date formats differ, dates may not be displayed in a consistent manner. If the separators differ, Autotransactions whose formulae contain decimals may produce unexpected results.

Dates and Export Files
Be careful when opening a Hansa Export file with Microsoft Excel with the intention of editing it before importing it to a new database. Under certain circumstances, Excel will, when opening a text file, convert some variables that it interprets as dates into its own internal date format. Where you are expecting a date to appear in the spreadsheet you may see a number such as "35475". When the spreadsheet is saved again as a text file these variables will not be converted back to date format. So, if you import this text file to Hansa, the dates will all be wrong. To avoid this problem, make sure you use the third step of Excel's Import Wizard to set all imported columns to 'text' format (highlight all the columns in the Data Preview area using the Shift key and select 'Text' as the Column Data Format).

Files created using the and 'Client Text Backup' functions cannot be opened in Excel as they are not text files.

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