How can I Add a new Time format with lower case am and pm? I would like to the time display to appear as 9:30am for example. I clicked on the Time Expansions tab in Customize Date and Time Expansions. However, the format that you provide to display this information is "tt" (without the quotation marks) and this causes it to display upper case AM or PM. Therefore, I don't know how to do this. Please advise.
Thanks,
Bill Deutchman, CPA
www.wddcpa.com
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Customize Time Expansion
Started by wddcpa1, Jan 14 2009 06:16 PM
3 replies to this topic
#2
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Posted 27 January 2009 - 04:07 PM
Hi Bill,
Good question. At this point there is no way to specify “am” and “pm” in lower case. This stems from the function call that is made to Windows to format the time string. That specific function doesn’t allow for lower case AM/PM strings... it does allow the specification of a single ‘A’ or ‘P’ following the time. This is a notation I’ve never seen, so that wasn’t made available.
Evan and I are reworking date and time strings for the newer windows version, so it’s glossaries can be easily shared with the Mac version of Spell Catcher.
John Tytler,
Rainmaker Research Inc.
Good question. At this point there is no way to specify “am” and “pm” in lower case. This stems from the function call that is made to Windows to format the time string. That specific function doesn’t allow for lower case AM/PM strings... it does allow the specification of a single ‘A’ or ‘P’ following the time. This is a notation I’ve never seen, so that wasn’t made available.
Evan and I are reworking date and time strings for the newer windows version, so it’s glossaries can be easily shared with the Mac version of Spell Catcher.
John Tytler,
Rainmaker Research Inc.
#3
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Posted 27 January 2009 - 07:52 PM
John,
When you wrote:
"This stems from the function call that is made to Windows to format the time string" it reminded me of a hard learned lesson in using Windows which happened years ago. I played around with it and have developed the way to do it so that it will display the way I want to see it when using Spell Catcher.
The procedure is, as follows:
Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > (the Regional Options tab is the default) > click the Customize button (to the right of English United States) > click the Time tab > on the AM symbol line, type am (lower case) and do the same for the PM symbol line (don't click anything on the line where you entered this), then click the Apply button in the lower right corner, then click OK.
To test this, I typed the "tt" Time Shorthand that is found in Spell Catcher Plus "Date & Time Expansions" in the Shorthand Expansions section of the Spell Catcher Settings. It displayed 8:18pm which is exactly what I wanted. If you want the lower case am and pm but prefer a space between the numbers and the am and pm, just press the spacebar and then type am or pm in the Time tab, as mentioned above.
Just for fun, I entered my first name on the PM symbol line, instead of "pm" and clicked Apply. When I typed "tt" (leave off the quotation marks), and, sure enough, it displayed 8:23bill - I immediately changed it back to my preference of lower case am and pm.
You may notice that the above is done in Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel, and not the Date and Time part of the Control Panel. Believe me, years ago when I was trying to modify how dates appeared in a different application, I looked at the Date and Time section of the Control Panel many times before I somehow found that I had to do it in the Regional and Language Options section.
I hope that this helps Spell Catcher users who want to modify how dates and times are displayed. Please be aware that these settings apply throughout Windows applications, not just Spell Catcher.
Regards,
Bill Deutchman, CPA
www.wddcpa.com
When you wrote:
"This stems from the function call that is made to Windows to format the time string" it reminded me of a hard learned lesson in using Windows which happened years ago. I played around with it and have developed the way to do it so that it will display the way I want to see it when using Spell Catcher.
The procedure is, as follows:
Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > (the Regional Options tab is the default) > click the Customize button (to the right of English United States) > click the Time tab > on the AM symbol line, type am (lower case) and do the same for the PM symbol line (don't click anything on the line where you entered this), then click the Apply button in the lower right corner, then click OK.
To test this, I typed the "tt" Time Shorthand that is found in Spell Catcher Plus "Date & Time Expansions" in the Shorthand Expansions section of the Spell Catcher Settings. It displayed 8:18pm which is exactly what I wanted. If you want the lower case am and pm but prefer a space between the numbers and the am and pm, just press the spacebar and then type am or pm in the Time tab, as mentioned above.
Just for fun, I entered my first name on the PM symbol line, instead of "pm" and clicked Apply. When I typed "tt" (leave off the quotation marks), and, sure enough, it displayed 8:23bill - I immediately changed it back to my preference of lower case am and pm.
You may notice that the above is done in Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel, and not the Date and Time part of the Control Panel. Believe me, years ago when I was trying to modify how dates appeared in a different application, I looked at the Date and Time section of the Control Panel many times before I somehow found that I had to do it in the Regional and Language Options section.
I hope that this helps Spell Catcher users who want to modify how dates and times are displayed. Please be aware that these settings apply throughout Windows applications, not just Spell Catcher.
Regards,
Bill Deutchman, CPA
www.wddcpa.com
John Tytler, on Jan 27 2009, 04:07 PM, said:
Hi Bill,
Good question. At this point there is no way to specify “am” and “pm” in lower case. This stems from the function call that is made to Windows to format the time string. That specific function doesn’t allow for lower case AM/PM strings... it does allow the specification of a single ‘A’ or ‘P’ following the time. This is a notation I’ve never seenxExpansions so that wasn’t made available.
Evan and I are reworking date and time strings for the newer windows version, so it’s glossaries can be easily shared with the Mac version of Spell Catcher.
John Tytler,
Rainmaker Research Inc.
Good question. At this point there is no way to specify “am” and “pm” in lower case. This stems from the function call that is made to Windows to format the time string. That specific function doesn’t allow for lower case AM/PM strings... it does allow the specification of a single ‘A’ or ‘P’ following the time. This is a notation I’ve never seenxExpansions so that wasn’t made available.
Evan and I are reworking date and time strings for the newer windows version, so it’s glossaries can be easily shared with the Mac version of Spell Catcher.
John Tytler,
Rainmaker Research Inc.
#4
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Posted 28 January 2009 - 12:23 AM
Thanks for the input Bill... much appreciated!
John Tytler
Rainmaker Research, Inc.
John Tytler
Rainmaker Research, Inc.
