Family Historian User Group

I started to use Grammarly to check my spelling and punctuation when creating a book. Some of my errors were showing the need to put a comma between two dates.
Example: James's Address was 7 Timber Hill Road btw Jan 28, 1966 and 1985 in Plainville, Hartford, Connecticut.
FH 7 will not let me put the coma in after 1966 in the date field. Is this a bug, or something we could have added to the program from Calico Pie, or is it a bug in Grammarly?
This is when making a book and exporting it as a Word document. I would just like to get some feedback from others that may have run into this.
I am running the free version of Grammarly.

I also use Grammarly and find it quite useful although I don't always agree with its suggestions, especially punctuation.
In FH the Date fields adhere to the GEDCOM specification which does not allow commas in Date Ranges or Date Periods.
That is why the comma is not allowed in the Date fields, so that is not a bug.
It might be possible to use some FH tools to get a comma into such dates in Reports/Books, or use some Find & Replace option in Word, but I would not bother. Just ignore that bit of Grammarly advice as what it suggests is not mandatory.

Ossey55 wrote: ↑

09 Jul 2023 21:08

Example: James's Address was 7 Timber Hill Road btw Jan 28, 1966 and 1985 in Plainville, Hartford, Connecticut.

In case you are not aware, a recent change was made in FH V7.0.20 which affects the way dates appear by default in narrative reports. The release notes for that version say:

The “Format for Dates” field, on the Format tab of Report Options, previously had no effect on how dates appeared in the body of narrative reports. It now does. So users are recommended to check, with all your narrative reports, that they are showing dates in the format you want, and adjust the setting if not.

The default is now for the date to be in Compact format, which results in examples like yours, where ‘between’ is displayed as btw. Similarly ‘from’, ‘calculated’, ‘estimated’ and ‘circa’ are frm, cal, est and c. Months are abbreviated so that ‘January’ is Jan.

I think this is inappropriate for a narrative report, particularly because btw and frm just look like typographical errors in a narrative! I think this is far more important than whether there is a comma somewhere in a date range or date period.

The setting is easy to change but I have suggested to CP that default date format for narrative reports should be Long.

Also, the sentence displayed in the Property box is always in the long format, and it is a natural to assume that is how it will appear in the report. Users should not have to change the default setting to make the report match the sentence in the Property box.