On 6 May 99, at 9:56, Susan Hays wrote:

> Can anyone give me any suggestions of a software program that checks your
> software applications and then fixes them to be Y2K compliant?  Applications
> like Word, Office, etc.

  Briefly, no.  If this were *possible*, you'd be seeing ticker-tape parades
for the person who had figured out HOW.  But it's not.

  There are at least four ways that an application program could fail to be
Y2K compliant:

1.  The application relies on an OS service that is not itself Y2K compliant.
Some applications that rely on such services take internal steps to
compensate for the deficiency -- such as treating year values from 0 to 49 as
2000 through 2049 instead of 1900 through 1949.  There is no way for an
external program, having discovered that the application uses a non-compliant
OS service, to tell whether it provides for such a correction or not.

2.  The application may use an OS service that is Y2K compliant, but use the
results in a way which fails to retain that compliance.  For instance, an
application may retrieve the current year as "1999", but then store it as
"99".  There is no way for an external program to look beyond the use of a
compliant OS service to determine that the results are then used improperly.

3.  The application may deal with dates on its own, without relying on OS
services to handle them at all.  If the application displays a form and
sticks the entered data into a database, there's no way for an external
program to guess that *this* two-character field is being used to hold the
year and is thus not Y2K compliant.

4.  Word and Excel, to pick the two best known, provide scripting/macro
facilities.  Even if the main application code is made compliant, there is no
way for any external program -- or the application -- to ensure that all
scripts/macros are also compliant.  This is why Microsoft describes the
latest revisions of these applications as "compliant (with issues)".


  While I believe that some of the press reports about Y2K are exaggerated, I
urge caution when approaching any Y2K-related program that promises to be
both easy and cheap/free.  It is extremely unlikely that any such program
does (only...) what it claims.


David G

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