I was able to find out that I need to use Oracle's date
format which is:

DD-MMM-YY

That made all the difference. Thanks Tony M.

Matt D.

-----Original Message-----
I am pulling data from an Oracle db into excel and am
writing the query in Microsoft Query accessed through
Excel. I am trying to utilize user specified criteria for
the date but it seems like there is a formatting issue.
MS
Query keeps saying:

ORA-01843: not a valid month

I even copied a date from the unfiltered data displayed
and pasted it into the user entry field but still
received
the same error. The data is showing up in the results
section as:

2000-05-01 00:00:00

But when I enter this into the Value field for MS Query
it
changes it automatically to:

#05/01/2000#

which does return the correct information, but then the
user cannot specify what they want to enter at anytime
without modifying the query. I have had a lot of success
with SQL ODBC connections and tables, but this is the
first time I have tied to pull from Oracle. Im I making
some sort of newbie mistake? Any sugestions would be
greatly appreciated as I have tried about every format I
can think of for the user entered data and I keep getting
the invalid month error.

Thanks

Matt

.