International Issues

** New - This section contains details on how to deal with the main International issues that arise when running Daisy.

Computer Setup

Since Microsoft Windows NT 4 and 2000 the setup for each country has been simple and thorough.

Make sure it is correctly set as Daisy uses these settings extensively.

Note that Daisy only works with the common Roman-character based languages, such as English, French, German, Spanish, Italian etc.

You may need to adjust the country code of the computer within Daisy. This is used to help decode phone numbers and other country-dependent fields.

Change the country code using the Options command in the Options menu.

You can also click the link below.

Help, Menus and Command

Currently, these are always in English.

Databases

Databases such as Microsoft Access and ADO, and other data such as Excel workbooks and worksheets generally follow a format set by the settings of the computer on which they were created.

So if you are say French and you are analysing an Access database that was created in the United States, then the simplest way to do this correctly is to set your computer to the United States standard.

Spelling

By default English spelling such as 'colour' and 'licence' is used.

However, all the help delivered with Daisy can be changed from English to American spelling and vice-versa from the Help Configure command in the Help menu.

Changing the language also changes some of the menu commands and some of the dialogs.

Numbers

Numbers illustrate one of the major problems of writing software such as Daisy.

In the UK and the US numbers are written as 1,232,123.56, whilst in most of Europe they would be written as 1.232.123,56, with the commas and periods reversed. To make matters worse some countries use spaces to separate the thousands.

It is easily possible to write a decode mode that is absolutely correct, but because so many cases would have to be tested, it would be very slow.

To further complicate matters all of the Daisy Examples are written with periods as the decimal points of the numerics.

However, databases tend to use numbers without the thousands separator or files can easily be produced in such a form.

To perform equally well on both types of data, Daisy has a dual mode, that can accept both 123.45 and 123,45 as the same number!

Change the Number Decoding using the Options command from the Options menu or click the link below.

Dates

Daisy can handle most dates, but if you really want to make sure that the program decodes them correctly use any of these forms :-

• 20020815 - This is the year as four digits, month as two and day as two.

  This is a very good form to use as it naturally sorts dates into ascending and decending order if they are treated as simple integers.

• 15-Aug-2002 - There is no ambiguity here!

• 15-Aug-02 - There may be here, but Daisy would assume the year was last.

Note that month names can be entered in either English or the local language.