date format - excluding year

Hello again -

I'm having trouble entering dates without the year. I want to keep the year
in a separate column (so I can sort or filter by year). I know I should be
able to format it using dd-mmm, but as soon as I export it to Excel, 2009 is
automatically tagged on the end and the format becomes "custom" (rather than
date format).

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

buggirl

If you're using the Date data type, you must store year: there's no way
around that. That's because under the covers, a date is an eight-byte
floating point number, where the integer portion represents the date as the
number of days relative to 30 Dec, 1899, and the decimal portion represents
the time as a fraction of a day.

That having been said, there's nothing stopping you from sorting or
filtering by year. Create a query, and add a calculated field that uses the
Year function to extract only the year from the date. Use that query
wherever you would otherwise have used the table.