I have an application that has lots and lots of dates in each of several forms. In the past, when using the forms to create new documents, users, all based in the US, have manually entered the dates as mm/dd/yyyy, which is how Americans are accustomed to entering dates. Recently a regulatory agency required the organization to start formatting dates as yyyy/mm/dd. To implement this we changed the date format in Windows from mm/dd/yyyy to yyyy/mm/dd. We made this change in mid-May, and everything worked splendidly. If users entered the current date as 2016/05/15, Notes interpreted it correctly as 15 May 2016. If out of habit a user entered the date as 05/15/2016, Notes errored out, because there is no 15th month, and thereby forced the user to re-enter the date in the correct format.

Then the Earth moved around the Sun and it became 01 June 2016. On that date, when people mistakenly, out of old habits, entered 6/1/16 instead of 16/6/1, Notes stopped catching it as an error but instead interpreted the date as 16 Jan 2006 and accepted it as a correctly formatted date. As a result lots of documents newly created on and in the days after June 1 were saved with incorrect dates, which made the owner of the application understandably unhappy.

The application owner wants me to do something to make Notes stop accepting dates entered by the users in mm/dd/yy format. For the 13th through the 31st days of each month Notes automatically catches the error because there are only 12 months in the year. My question: How can I get Notes to catch the error on the first 12 days of each month?

I had hoped, in having the organization change their Windows date formats, to save them the expense of having me (charging by the hour) recode lots and lots of date fields. However, the application owner wants to make it impossible for users to make this date entry error, so it looks like I am going to have to do that anyway, and I'm wondering about two things:

First, I'm wondering if there is a way to dumb down Notes so that it would just accept wrongly formatted dates, even when the month component is entered as 13 or higher. I'm looking for a notes.ini variable here. At least this way, users wouldn't be lulled 12 days of each month into getting away with entering dates in mm/dd/yyyy format.

Second, assuming you can't easily do the first, I'm looking for the least intrusive way of recoding the date fields. I could force the users to use the date picker. But some of the dates are things like birth dates of very old people, and I find the date picker painful to use when having to go back many years in the past. And all I really want to do is let the users enter dates as they always have, i.e., manually, but to to somehow have it be obvious to them when they enter a date in the wrong format. Maybe Notes could refuse to accept the year in one- or two-digit format. Maybe Notes could prominently display the resulting date as the user enters it, or immediately after the user moves to the next field, in such a way as to alert the user that she entered 2006 Jan 16 when she thought she was entering June 1, 2016. 

Any ideas? Suggestions?