A Canadian can’t get a date

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No, this isn’t a story of unfulfilled love, but a problem where I have my language set to Canadian English (eh?)and am trying to use the “Show Autotext tip for Autotext and dates” feature. How do I make it work when I have Canadian English selected? When I set it back to US English, it works fine. Would some good neighbour please honour my request and give me a good colour analysis of the problem?

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I can’t help directly, other than to say that it works OK here in Australian English.

Perhaps it’s a plot by your neighbors down south

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John,

There’s something wrong then with your Australian spellchecker.

I’m just being a good neighbour.

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Geoff,

Well done. You spotted the deliberate mistake

(But we have to write for our audience and we can’t have spelling here of every colour/color and flavour/flavor, including those of our neighbours/neighbors because it would put us a bit off centre/center with the SSS)

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I love the humour! But back to the original question. If I am not getting the date, regardless of the language, how can I get it to work.

For example, I type F E B R, up comes February and I hit enter to put the word in my text. I hit the space bar and expect to see today’s date. What I get is 01. Anybody have any idea of what is happening and how to fix it?

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John,I think it depends on your date formatting in Windoze. In Kiwiland we have dates as dd/mm/yy. When I type Febr and hit enter I just get February. If I type 12 Febr I get 12 February then space and enter and have the year added – 01.

Hope this helps

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My long date is MMMM d, yyyy. My short date is dd/mm/yy.
My regional settings are set to English (Canadian). The default date format I am using in Word is February 11, 2001 – English Canadian. I have set and reset the autotext checkbox. The only way I seem to be able to get the thing to work is if I set it to English (US). Even then it works some of the time but not all of the time.

What am I doing wrong?

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Hi John – Apologies for the humour (?) taking us off track.

Having read your example (F E B R 01) I now understand your problem better. My machines with Word 97 and 2000 in Australian English display the same problem that you describe.

If we enter “12 Feb” then the tool tip appears with the full date and pressing Enter then gives “12 February 2001” which is the normal format used in Australia and which caused my earlier comment that we had no problem. But I can’t get “February 12, 2001” which I now gather is the format that you want.

I’ve tried changing to US English through Regional Settings in the Control Panel but it made no difference. I’ve changed the Key Board language from US English 101 to US English International and Australian English – all to no avail.

I’ve searched the MS KnowledgeBase and nothing there.

I gone though the MS MVP site for tips and nothing there.

Perhaps it’s a characteristic of versions of Word sold outside the US.

Frustrating enough to make you

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I experimented using the various date formats – Insert Date and Time, then clicked on “default” -which allows you to set your chosen default for date and time and it works for me no matter which option I choose (Word 97-aka 97 with patches =Word 8). I should mention I’m on a standalone pc (that is, not networked so I have the option of deciding which formats I prefer although I am able to make the same choices at work where I’m on WIN(95) NT on 400+ user network). HTH

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Patricia – I take it that you are saying that if you enter “Febr” and this hit Return, you get a fully formatted date such as “February 13, 2001”. Is that correct?

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If I type “Febr” I get “February”. If I type “February” in full I get the date “February 12, 2001” popping up & enter to auto complete. I should mention that I am using English (Canadian). Just a thought: check Tools, Options, then click on the Spelling & Grammar tab to see if anything is unchecked that should be checked in order to auto-complete to work for you?

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Thank you for your devotion to this problem. Even though you haven’t discovered the solution, it is nice to know that I am not alone.

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Tried both of these. Did not work.

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Tried everything that everybody stated. It still doesn’t work. However, read on. Perhaps somebody can solve the puzzle.

My regional setting is English Canadian.
My short date setting is dd/MM/yy.
My long date setting is MMMM d, yyyy.

In Word my default language is set to English (Canada).

In my Autotext, I have the box checked about the show autocomplete tip for autotext and dates.

For date and time, the language is set to English (Canada).

My default date format is @ “MMMM d, yyyy”.

HOWEVER (YES, I AM SHOUTING), I have a style called date. This style appears as “Normal +”. I can set it so it goes to “Normal + English (US)”. However, I can not set it so it becomes “Normal + English (Canada)”.

Now the funny part. When I set it to “Normal + English (US)” the Autocomplete for the date works. I type F E B, then February is suggested and I hit enter. I hit the space bar and today’s date comes up. I change the language to English (Canada) and it still works.

HOWEVER (I AM SHOUTING AGAIN), when I create a new document, even though I have put Date + English (US) on the normal template, it doesn’t work.

HELP!!!! I am going crazy.

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This would certainly be making me crazy! I’m throwing out the following just in case it may be useful:
Just curious: You mentioned you have created a style for date. Just wonder why you decided to create a style. If you use Alt+Shift+D it inserts the date of your choice (Click on Insert, Date, then choose the format you like before doing Alt+Shift+D – and while you’re there, you can set it as a default if you wish: i.e. Tuesday, February 13, 2001, etc.)
Another thought: Are you, by any chance, using Insert, Field to get your date? That can be rather problematic if the correct switches are not used.
In the meantime, if you ARE using insert field, try out the Insert Date routine mentioned above.
Whether I use Australian, US or Canadian English they all work

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Yes, personally I use Alt + Shift + D a lot. However, I do believe that it puts a date that will change as the days go by, right, because the date is @Date, which changes from day to day?

The problem is that I sometimes teach some beginner courses in Word and one of the things that is in some of the text is the Autotext for the date, however, if the language is set to English (Canadian) it is so unpredictable and I look so stupid when I have no idea how to fix it except to try going to English (US), which sometimes works but not all of the time.

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Yes, frustrating situation. However, when you go to insert, Date, if you do not want the date to automatically update, do NOT check off that item. In other words, whatever date you put in remains.

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Just reread your posting. I have never created a style for a date that I know of. When I go to my style list, there is a style called Date. It allows me to add English (US), but not English (Canadian). I can insert dates every other way with no problem. The only problem is with the Autotext.

It is no huge deal if I never find the answer. I am just one of those people who needs to know why and will search until an answer is found.

I do appreciate everyone’s input.

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Hi John. Nope! You’re not going mad.I just duplicated your problem. If I do Alt+Shif+D I get the date regardless of language setting. However,if I try to use the style “Date” I’m dead in the water. I’m guessing that since this style is one shipped with Word then it’s ‘hard-coded’ into Word. In other words [no pun intended!] you would have to create a NEW style, based on “Date” and then modify it to suit your Cdn style. However I haven’t tested this out.

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AutoText (which the date is, sort of) is tied into styles in funny ways. For instance if you are in a particular style and call up the AutoText toolbar, you may find no entries available although there are hundreds in your template! I’m wondering if your style may be what is causing the problem. I will try get styles to do the same thing here.

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I ran the following tests:

Test with English U.S. settings.
Type

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Hi Charles! What version of Word are you on? NT or standalone?

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Hi Patricia,

I’m running Word 97 & Word 2000 on Win 98 (although I use Word 2000 almost exclusively these days). Spent several years running Word 97 on NT 4.0, though.

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At least it is comforting to know that I am not going crazy and others can duplicate my dilemma.

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I have had the same problem. I now have it working so that when I hit Alt-Shift-D, I get February 21, 2001. I had to make a change in the Registry. See Microsoft Article KB #Q134910. I am a Word Perfect user trying to convert to Word. Getting very frustrated and wasting a lot of time. Hope this works for you.

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Sorry for my ignorance, but how do I get to that Microsoft Article?

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Go to this link http://search.support.microsoft.com/kb/. In the area where it tells you if you have the article # type in Q134910. Don’t try this if you’re not comfortable with editing the Registry.
I haven’t got it working for auto correct but I don’t really care. I like keyboard shortcuts and thus far it’s working for me.

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Thanks for the info on how to get to the article. I went to my regedit and the date format seems to be set up properly, however, I did discover something that might be the source of all of my problems. Attached is a wordpad document that describes what I discovered when I went to my regedit for Word 9, which I assume is the same as Word 2000.

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Here’s the direct link to the article you mentioned

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Thanks. I got to the link. Have a look at the attachment I sent in my previous posting. Is this the demon that is creating the problem?

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I have a similar problem in that I have set the default language on a template to English (Canada) but the date default is English (UK). I changed the date default to English (Canada) and resaved the template, but when I open a new document using this template, the date default has reverted to the UK.

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