A very useful resource for Australian Quicken users is Stephen O'Brien: Using Quicken 7 for Windows (ISBN 0-7248-1258 X RRP $39.95); a review is in this issue of PC Update.

I noticed an interesting side note in the book; it reveals that-like many other Windows-based software packages - Quicken solves the Y2K problem by windowing. That means the program uses a translation table that treats, in this particular case, 2-digit year dates 50-99 as being 19nn, and 2-digit year dates 00-49 as 20nn. The cut-off, which is 49/50 in this instance, can vary from application to application.

A potential problem is that different applications use different cut-offs. For example, if data in an application, ElCheapo Financials, is exported to a UBeaut Spreadsheet file, and one program splits the year at 39/40, and the other at 49/50, what happens?

Even though there may be provision for user-preference of a 2-digit or 4-digit year, down in the engine room the real record uses two digits. Because Quicken is hardly the program one would use for long range plots, forecasts, and the like that call for year ranges over 100, its approach should not cause any problems. However, it is not clear what happens when data is exported to another application that splits the years at a different point.

Windowing has some significant disadvantages: it won't work in situations where the range of years exceeds 100; it will have problems where variables are used for sorting and indexing; it introduces complexities for future maintenance; and it is vulnerable to mismatching where other applications or systems use a different cut-off year. There were a few professional Y2K titles published amongst the mountain of books on the subject; three in particular discuss the windowing technique: Y2K in a Nutshell (published by O'Reilly), The Year 2000 Software Crisis (details following), and Year 2000 Best Practices (details following).

In the library are:

Hayes & Ulrich: The Year 2000 Software Crisis
ISBN 0-13-655664-7
Published by Prentice Hall 1997

Hayes & Ulrich: The Year 2000 Software Crisis - The Continuing Challenge
ISBN 0-13-960154-6
Published by Prentice Hall 1998

This is a follow-up to the previous title and contains a good discussion of windowing.  
Dick Lefkon, ed.: Year 2000 Best Practice
ISBN 0-13-646506-4
Published by Prentice Hall 1998

Windowing comes under Date Windowing (p.301) and Dynamic Bridging (p.333). This is a collection of papers by a long list of authors and was the primary sourcebook for 1997 U.S. Congressional Hearings. The book has no index! But it is a fascinating browse. Books about Y2K should not be sent off for recycling. There are some that should not have seen the light of day, but those mentioned above will continue to have relevance.

Reprinted from the April 2000 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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