12/14/98 TRAPPING Y2K BUGS--ON YOUR PC

TRAPPING Y2K BUGS--ON YOUR PC
Now there's software to help you seek out and prevent millennial disasters
While corporations and governments scramble to make sure their computers are ready for the millennium, many PC owners are wondering what to do. The good news is that their computers aren't going to drop dead on Jan. 1, 2000. But PC software, especially database and spreadsheet programs used to run small businesses, may hide many date-sensitive problems that could already be causing trouble. (For a good overview of the problem, see www.ibm.com/ibm/year2000/pcs.)
There's nothing like new software to fix the problems created by your old programs, and the industry is meeting the challenge. I tried two Windows products designed to help computer owners deal with Year 2000 issues.
First, a word about the problem: In the PC world, most of the Y2K attention has focused on the fact that some computers' clocks will have difficulty dealing with the new millennium. These products, along with many others, can diagnose such problems and, in the great majority of cases, fix them permanently.
The more serious potential problem involves your applications--and is harder to fix. Your software may interpret dates as being in the 21st century when you intended them to be in the 20th, or vice versa. Such misinterpretations can cause problems in many business applications, such as assigning a 70-year-old a birth date of 2028.
Norton 2000 from Symantec (877 469-7467 or www.symantec.com) offers a comprehensive treatment. The $50 program scans the spreadsheets and databases produced by a variety of popular programs and lists the potential problems. Virtually all programs use a formula to assign a century to two-digit years when data are entered. For example, Microsoft Excel 97 spreadsheet uses the 30th year as a dividing point between determining whether a date should be listed as this century or the next--5/11/28, for example, will be read as May 11, 2028, while 7/14/31 is July 14, 1931.
Unfortunately, different programs use different rules. Norton 2000 will go through your spreadsheet and database files and point out dates near the century-change dividingline (usually within five years), as well as other potential date errors. Besides Microsoft Access and Excel files, it checks Visual Basic programs for likely problems. Norton 2000 produces annotated copies of spreadsheets with potential errors color-coded by severity. For example, a two-digit date display is judged less severe than a two-digit data-entry field.
The program yields lots of detailed data, but interpreting it and identifying the real problems, and fixing them, can be hard. The manual, unfortunately supplied only in electronic form, explains the sometimes abstruse messages. All told, Norton 2000 is best suited for the relatively sophisticated.
Check 2000 PC Deluxe from Greenwich Mean Time (800-216-5545 or www.gmt-2000.com) is a useful complement to Norton 2000. The $50 program checks all the programs on your hard disk against a range of known Y2K issues and creates a report. But it's not very good at separating trivial problems, such as the failure of Adobe Photoshop to validate dates, from serious ones. The file scan only reports on generic problems that can exist in files of a certain type.
None of these programs can solve all your Y2K problems. In particular, users of accounting or financial-management software should contact the publisher (or visit the Web site) to check on any date-related issues. The thing to remember is that Y2K is neither trivial nor earth-shattering for PC owners, but a manageable problem that will take some effort on your part to correct.
BY STEPHEN H. WILDSTROM