When you’re creating a new Fiscal Calendar in Deltek Cobra, you’ll find that the date format you choose for your labels will make a difference to more than the column headers in reports.
This article looks at some areas that you might not realize are affected by the date format you choose for your calendar labels in Deltek Cobra.
When you create or edit a calendar in Deltek Cobra, you are offered various date formats for your calendar labels. Typically the system defaults to MM/dd/yyyy as the initial offering. However, any date format that contains a backslash could be problematic for you; particularly if you are planning on running batch reports or exporting the data to wInsight.
For the most part, the date format you choose is only affecting the column headers for certain reports such as Time-phased reports.
However, batch reporting and wInsight Export features allow you to use the current date’s (TODATE) label as part of a file name. Batch reports can be created in a sub-folder on a drive that uses the period label as a name for that folder.
Trouble is the operating system has a use for those back-slash & forward-slash characters: they represent a new folder. So when you run your batch report, instead of getting a nice neat folder with a date name, you get three folders, one below the next, meaning some extra drilling to get to your batch of reports.
Bummer.
If, however you use a format that contains dashes, not so much. We actually recommend the YYYY-MM-DD format for your labels as this will organize your batch reports into neat date-order folders for easy navigation – something like the following:
You can change the formatting of your date labels at any time with a calendar set by right-clicking and choosing the Edit Calendar Set… option.
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