Quickly select month-begin and month-end dates for VB, Internet, Excel, Access!
Month End is a different kind of calendar control that lets users activate month begin and month end dates with a minimum of clicks. It doesn't pop up a whole lot of calendars, with a bunch of date dates or buttons, make users go back and forth between years, or do any of the difficult tasks that all calendar controls require. It just sits there. It doesn't change.
Why does selecting two dates have to be so difficult?
Month End is a Visual Basic ActiveX calendar control. Programmers place it in an application and get beginning and ending dates for selected months. It's intended to be used in reporting applications. It can also be used as an Internet control (IIS only), or in Excel, Access, or any application that can use ActiveX controls.
Features:
Left-click for From-Month value (like Jan 1, 2007).
Right-click for To-Month value (like Aug 31, 2007).
Double-click to get one month FROM - and - TO dates.
The year drop-down relates to ToDate. Whatever is the year, that's the year of ToMonth. Think about it. You really don't NEED to know what the year of FromMonth is if you know the year of ToMonth.
The program will NOT allow you to select dates outside of your range.No errors appear to disturb your users, the control just KNOWS what you want, and re-adjusts itself accordingly.
The control exposes the month NUMBER of the values you selected. Like, if your data goes from Oct 1, 2002 through Dec, 2004, that's 27 months. If you select May, 2002 through Feb, 2003, the control returns 8 through 17. This is great for programs that summarize all data in months by column, or in a back-end program. Help tells you how to calculate dates with Month End.
As you cross years the calendar adjusts itself to accommodate what you mean. If you select ToDate as Feb, 2002, then right-click on Dec, the control KNOWS that you mean Dec, 2001, so it re-adjusts the year drop-down.
There are properties to change to 4-week years (13 months) calendars and 2 months of 4-week-calendars and 1 one month of a 5-week calendar.
You can tell the calendar control you want to end on Aug 31 of this year, (e.g.) and you want to go back 24 months (or any number, of course). This is useful for forecasting, budgets, or if you only carry a certain number of months in your database.
You can get the begin and end dates of all the months in-between that your user selected.
See the left side-bar for examples of how to do some of these things. The help file provides detailed examples of all the SQL statements you could think of.
There are extensive examples and discussion on back-end programming and how to accomplish it with MonthEnd. Help also includes many examples of attaching Excel files, Foxpro, and beginning-to-end on creating a back-end data base.
This control has been used in Sales Force Automation applications we developed, and has enjoyed wide-spread praise for ease of use.
Use MonthEnd to construct SQL statements using From/To dates.
Construct Cross-Tab and Pivot Tables with MonthEnd.
