WPDOS and the Y2K problem | Home page
WordPerfect 5.1 and 6.x for DOS are generally free of Y2K problems, and accept four-digit years in almost all dialogs where you can enter dates. Most ambiguities and problems can be avoided by entering four-digit years wherever possible. Minor problems arise in the Document Summary feature, where you can type in a four-digit year in the Creation Date and Revision Date fields, but only a two-digit year will display.
In WPDOS 5.1, system dates after 1999 are displayed incorrectly in the upper-left corner of the file manager screen, with the tens digit of the year displayed as a punctuation mark or letter instead of a numeral (2001 is represented as ";1").
In the table feature of WPDOS 6.x, if a two-digit-year date format is used, years between 00 to 49 are interpreted as 2000 to 2049; years between 50 and 99 are interpreted as 1950 to 1999.
Details of these problems are no longer posted on the Y2K-related pages on Corel's web site, but this site contains the full content of Corel's Y2K pages on WPDOS 5.1 and 5.1+ and Corel's Y2K pages on WPDOS 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2.
Other problems, not noted on Corel's pages, occur in the fax feature in WPDOS 5.1+ and 6.x. First, starting in the year 2000, the WPDOS fax feature is unable to schedule faxes so that they are sent at a future date or time; faxes must be sent immediately or not at all. Also, in the To/From page header on faxes sent from WPDOS in 2001, the date is represented as ";1", and the same error occurs in the fax logs in the programs themselves. This error is related to the date error in the WPDOS 5.1 file manager described above.