Year 2000 Authority Reacts To Microsoft Office 2000

"Office 2000 demonstrates Microsoft's lack of understanding of the way real people use its products."

England -- 23 June 1999: Microsoft’s release of Office 2000 - just over 200 days before the end of the century – is set to create even more confusion about the year 2000 problem. This is according to Karl W Feilder, widely respected year 2000 authority, who says that it introduces less standardisation just when more is required.

Feilder says Office 2000, when running under Windows 98, has changed the rules for Y2K project managers working against the clock to fix their PC data. The problem stems from the way Office 2000 handles two digit year dates under Windows 98, as he explains.

"Most PC users type two digit years into their PC, yet the PC software calculates using a four digit date. Where does it get the other two digits? Each software program uses a guessing algorithm called a date window. Unfortunately there has been no standardisation between the different software manufacturers. Had there been, the scale of the year 2000 problem would not be so great."

Office 2000 now allows users to set up to 99 date windows of their own choosing. Feilder describes the very real scenario Microsoft has created by allowing this when Office 2000 is run on Windows 98.

"Two different users type the same two digit date into the same spreadsheet and it means two different dates because each user has set their own date window. This is particularly dangerous in a networked environment where users share access to common databases. The interpretation of the date will now depend on how their individual PC is configured, not on how their central database is configured."

He explains that if you’re going to use two digit dates you really want them to mean the same four digit dates no matter which program you’re using and who you’re sharing data with. He points out that this is enshrined in the British Standards Institution's Statement of Conformity, the only definition of year 2000 conformity in the world today that goes into any detail. It states: "In all interfaces the century … must be specified by unambiguous algorithms."*

"In other words," says Feilder, "the date window must be the same so that any two digit year is always expanded to the same four digit year within any program. In allowing 99 possible date windows, Office 2000 now makes dates ambiguous."

Feilder says there are two possible solutions. "The best is for everyone to only ever use four digit years. The other calls for even more desktop management software, such as Microsoft's Policy Manager. While this may be a good approach for many professional networks, I fear it's going to create more confusion for too many users."

He says that Office 2000 also introduces a third possible reconfiguration of dates for Microsoft Excel - and a fourth for Microsoft Access. This significantly decreases the compatibility of Excel spreadsheets and Access databases between different versions of Microsoft Office and will slow Y2K projects down instead of helping companies finish them in time.

"I've been concerned all along that users were waiting for Microsoft to somehow magically 'fix' the year 2000 problem. Microsoft's Office 2000 is a perfect example of my concerns."

Feilder describes Microsoft's Y2K efforts to date as chequered. "Recently great strides have been made by their year 2000 group but I fear Office 2000 has undone all that work. For over three years I’ve been trying to help them understand the need to REMOVE all two digit year possibilities from their products. Now they’re going in the opposite direction."

Microsoft states quite clearly that it is not responsible for the way anyone uses its software. Feilder feels they should take more responsibility for helping users solve their year 2000 problems.

"This is like selling machine guns and saying you're not responsible if they kill people. Office 2000 on Windows 98 not only hands a machine gun to the end user, it also supplies 99 bullets, and Microsoft is legally absolved from any consequences."

*Rule 3.2 b of the British Standards Institution PD2000-1 Statement of Year 2000 Conformity.