Those of you that follow this blog or have seen my forum posts regarding the built-in date picker know my thoughts on the matter.  To put it simply, it is a disgrace that this is what Microsoft supplied with Access for selecting dates.  If you want more reasons as to why I think this, refer to my earlier post

So, since I highly recommend completely disabling the built-in date picker and replacing it, I thought I should show a couple of the excellent replacements.

Also, another reason to implement a date picker and stop manual entry by your users is to avoid formatting issues depending on what format the user chose to use when inputting the date.  06/11/11, what’s the day, month and year?  No guarantee Access will save it as was intended by the users.  However, by using a date picker, you have 100% certainty that the date entered is the date saved!

Allen Browne’s Popup Calendar

Allen’s calendar is a straightforward form based pop-up calendar allowing users to easily change month and years.

Stephen Lebans’ Month Calendar

Stephen’s calendar is a VBA class driven calendar and offer the ability to customize a great deal of options (see the Properties drop-down in the top left-hand corner), settings such as the number of months to display, colors, fonts, …

Arvin Meyer’s Calendar2k Calendar Form

Although this is very similar to the built-in calendar, Arvin’s allows the user to click on the previous or next arrow buttons and keep it pressed down while it iterates though each month, so it is much faster to work with.

CyberCow’s Time Pieces

CyberCow offers a whole series of what he termed “Time Pieces” for working with Dates and Times.  His are all form based and enable the user to input the year or month, making it extremely easy to jump to a month of interest in only a couple click of your keyboard.  He also offers the ability to enter times with ease.  The above is only a minor sampling from the download, there are other tools in the download that you’ll have to discover for yourself.

Peter Hibb’s Pop-up Calendar

This is yet again another great alternative/improvement over the lowly Microsoft implementation of a date picker.  His pop-up calendar allow for date picking, or date & time picking.  It is easy to use, flexible (can easily change year, month).  Definitely worth checking out, then again, considering its’ source is there any surprise there!

As you can see for yourselves, there are a multitude of freely available alternatives that far surpass anything Microsoft has offered us!  So simplify your users lives by implementing one of them today!  Trust me they will thank you.