Suite Applications Face Year 2000 Woes

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March 30, 1998 (12:00 AM EST)

By Lee Pender,

Guess what? Desktop applications are not immune to the infamous year 2000 problem.

Users of popular PC spreadsheets and databases will see their own snafus come the turn of the century and beyond if corporate IS and support staffs are not on their toes, value-added resellers (VARs) said. This flies in the face of the perception that year 2000 woes fall solely in the mainframe realm.

To make matters worse, problems arising from spreadsheet projections or database analyses could be insidious, said one independent service vendor. "It's not that you'll have to reboot your machine," he said. It's that you could run projections that will look plausible and actually be quite wrong."

Popular products such as Excel, Access, Lotus 1-2-3, and Corel Quattro Pro will be affected, observers said.

Microsoft's Excel and Access use a "fixed-date window" for determining whether a two-digit date should be represented as being in the 20th or 21st century. That window cuts off at 29, so two-digit dates less than 29 are interpreted as 21st century dates. Consequently, Access and Excel recognize 15 as 2015. However, both applications recognize 31 as 1931 -- not 2031. The same is true for Lotus Development's Approach.

Quattro Pro uses the same scheme, but the cutoff is between the numbers 50 and 51.

Current Lotus 1-2-3 versions accept two-digit and four-digit designations. Two digits are assumed by the program to be 20th century dates.

"you could run projections that will look plausible and actually be quite wrong."
-- Independent service vendor

Users who enter four-digit fields escape the bug. Those who have entered two-digit dates since they began using the software must manually convert all dates to four digits to escape year 2000 calculation flaws, said Lee Kirby, area director for enterprise services at Los Angeles-based VAR NovaQuest Info Systems.

"The most critical area is the finance groups in a company," Kirby said. "Look at a 30-year mortgage. Most companies do an enormous amount of calculations in Excel, and those calculations have date dependencies in them. It's very subtle, but it's a business risk."

More Than Finance
But finance is not the only potential problem area. Pat Adams, president of DB Unlimited, an independent development firm in Brooklyn, N.Y., said other vertical applications are at risk.

"You can't use Access as it is now to create a product for medical or insurance where you have birthdays that span centuries," Adams said. "If you start thinking about history files or birth and death files, you can see how that would cause a problem."

Excel also could cause problems, Adams said, adding: "The majority of people are going to be OK with this 30 stuff, but there are going to be instances where there are economists who are trying to project models who might have problems with it."

"The vast majority of customers are not going to have a problem using Office well into the next century," said Office product manager Andrew Dixon. "You can be pretty sure that all the work we're doing will be taking everything into consideration."

Dixon did not specify how Microsoft would solve the issue in the next release. One Microsoft Solution Provider questioned Microsoft's year 2000 stance, however. "A year ago, [Microsoft] said there are no year 2000 problems with its apps. ... In the last three months, its website has come up with some more information but still paints a rosy picture. They were supposed to, in March, put up a more comprehensive site with tips and education, but it hasn't happened."

Jason Matusow, year 2000 strategy manager for Microsoft, refuted that characterization. "We have never once made a claim as to the compliance of our product. We are going to define compliance ourselves," he said.

The latest version of Office for the Macintosh, shipping this week, employs the same 29/30 cutoff as Office 97, said Deanna Meyer, product manager. She noted Microsoft's definition of year 2000-compliance for its products is not yet complete.

"There's no industrywide standard of what compliance means," Meyer said. "In order to say that Office 98 is compliant, we have to define what compliance is."

Office competitor Lotus [profile], in Cambridge, Mass., believes it has found its definition. The company's SmartSuite Millennium Edition, currently in beta, uses a rolling 80/20 window.

Dates in the next 20 years are considered to be in the 21st century. VARs or users can customize that setting, said Robert Norton, director of product development.

SmartSuite's configuration is in line with parent company IBM's standards, he said.

But experts said there is no quick fix. "No matter how you do it, it's going to inconvenience somebody. The perfect solution is to live with four characters," said Dick Moffat, president of Personal Logic, a London, Ontario, consultant.

Consequently, IT managers are hard-pressed to fix the problem, and VARs stand to profit. Kirby said requests for year 2000 desktop software fixes are doubling every month at NovaQuest, and those requests should continue to translate into a huge revenue stream.