"JMF" <jfavaro@tin.it> wrote in message
news:uPq%23kZmUGHA.224@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
> I'm back, after posting just a couple of hours ago about "old" dates and
> getting great help.
>
> Now I know more about what my friend is trying to do, and I'm intrigued by
> the problem and am wondering how a real clever expert, like in this group,
> would handle it.
>
> She's archiving historical letters and using an Excel file. So she's got
> rows with the topic, who wrote it, who received it, the date, etc. Let's
> ignore the problem of "old" dates now and assume they're all after 1900.
>
> Here's the tricky part: she's not sure about some dates.
>
> This is classical, of course, in archival. For example:
>
> 1933? means "we think it was written in 1933 but we're not sure"
>
> 193? means "we know it was in the 1930s, but we're not sure which
> year"
>
> 10/09/1934? means "we think it was that date but we're not sure"
>
> Now, of course, you can imagine what happens when you try to put those as
> dates into Excel.
>
> Yet, she would still like to be able to sort by dates, etc. so somehow it
> would be nice, and important, to preserve the "date-ness" of those date
> entries.
>
> So what to do?
>
> It seems to me that there's no way around having more than one item per
> date: The date itself, whereby you use some system to "guess" the date
> where there is a question mark, and somehow some other item that records
> the uncertainty in some way -- I don't know, like another column where it
> says "sure/unsure" (although that isn't general enough).
>
> Anybody have any insights? Perhaps one of you has dealt with something
> similar?
>
> Thanks,
>
> John

You could use a helper column alongside the dates and have codes in it such
as "verified" , "unverified". "approx year", "decade" etc to suit your
situation.