PPT97: Day of Week in Date Field Changes When Saved as 4.0 File (184248)

SYMPTOMS

When you open a PowerPoint file, all date fields that are set to update automatically, will appear with the correct month, day, and year but the day of the week will be incorrect. For example, if you are using this format

Day of week, Month day, year

and the date is this

Thursday, January 1, 1998

the day of the week in the field will be incremented by one day, resulting in this:

Friday, January 1, 1998

CAUSE

This problem occurs if you originally created the file in either PowerPoint 97 for Windows or PowerPoint 98 Macintosh Edition, inserted the date and time as a field, and then saved the file in PowerPoint 4.0 format.

WORKAROUND

If you save your PowerPoint presentation in PowerPoint 4.0 format, do not select the Update Automatically option in the Date And Time dialog box. When you clear this option, the date and time will be inserted as normal text. To insert the field as normal text, follow these steps:

On the Insert menu, click Date And Time.
Click to clear the Update Automatically check box.
Click OK.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION

When you save a PowerPoint 97 for Windows or a PowerPoint 98 Macintosh Edition file in PowerPoint 4.0 format, all header and footer items, including the date fields appear as if they were applied to each individual slide in the presentation. These items are converted to text boxes. Therefore, if you want to edit them you must edit each slide. For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

169094 PPT97: Limitations of Converting to PowerPoint 4.0 Format