Y2K

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For more structured information, and especially for testing--find out what your vendors say, but don't trust them without confirming their claims!--take a look at the Norton 2000 product mentioned above. In both an inexpensive personal version ($40 street) and a not-too-expensive corporate version (about $25 per seat), Norton 2000 is the best general- purpose Y2K testing package I've seen. Much more specialized (and more expensive) programs are available for corporate IT managers as well.

Actually, I don't worry so much about Y2K compatibility with recent software. I worry about you--and me. No matter how much software vendors wring out their products, shedding bad code, most of the problems we'll see will arise from what we've done with those packages.

If you've routinely used two-digit year dates in your spreadsheet's date-calculation formulas and functions, for example, you may be in trouble. Most recent and all current spreadsheet software I know will automatically expand year dates for calculations if you've chosen to display them with only two digits--but only if you've actually entered them as four-digit years. Think about it: How else could they work?

Checking your own work can be daunting. How many spreadsheets have you built, and how many do you still use? How many of those have you passed on to others? And how many have been passed on even farther in your company, probably to people you have no idea use them? What about databases you've constructed, or more likely, into which you've entered date data?

How will you find that data and correct it as necessary? Waiting until problems arise is not a very smart option. Do you really want to go through every worksheet, cell by cell, and every database record, looking for bad data?

I've spoken to well over a hundred audiences around the country about Y2K issues over the past couple of years. I've been astonished to find how few people in those audiences had considered that they might be part of the Y2K problem, through sloppy habits in building and using PC spreadsheet and database programs.

And--True Confessions time--I'm as guilty as they are. Until we devoted most of a week to running down specific date entries in the data files in general use in my office, we had some problems. Umm--make that a lot of problems. Almost all of them caused by me, with my sloppy, lazy, two-digit year date data-entry habits.

And I'm supposed to know about this stuff.

Next time, I'll set the computer-specific items aside and focus on those larger societal issues I mentioned. This is important stuff; stay tuned.

Реферат опубликован: 23/06/2006