World Wide Interest

When Formulate2 was released in March of 2006, we had no idea that it would generate the level of world-wide interest we have since experienced.

While providing translations of the software in languages other than English is yet in the future, we have revised Formulate2 to provide extended compatibility with Locales outside the US. The listing below provides information about these changes and some of the international issues that have been addressed with this update.

International Issues

Aside from languages, alphabets and characters there are many other issues that pertain to locale compatibility throughout our world community. Date, time and number formats as well as other things must also be considered. With this revision, the following items have been addressed.

Date Format

Two different date formats are used in Formulate2. Dates that appear in reports will appear in the format specified in the Windows Regional and Language Options of the control panel.

The Last Update field of both Feed and Ration records is maintained by the program and does not accept user input. The dates you see there will be formatted in a proprietary format of YYYY/MM/DD. If you wish to conduct a range search on dates in these fields, it will be necessary to enter date values in the query form in this format in order to obtain the correct search results.

Time Format

The time value only appears in reports and will be formatted according to the Windows Control Panel Regional and Language settings.

Number Format

Numbers appearing in reports and Feed and Ration records will be formatted according to the Windows Control Panel Regional and Language settings. The issues addressed here impacted not only the display of numbers but also the conversion of user input to numeric values and thereby the results of calculations based on the conversion of strings to numbers.

In addition to the number format changes, Formulate2 will allow entering decimal points in numbers from the keyboard ten-key pad decimal key regardless of the locale setting or the decimal separator character currently mapped to the key. Also, numeric formats in report definitions may be entered in any valid locale number format.

Summary

The changes described above will add familiarity and greater ease of use for those in locales with date, time and number formats differing from US formats. Other changes that do not appear on the presentation level were also made that will greatly facilitate future translations of Formulate2 into languages other than English.