I thought I could reformat a date variable to drop the year for a map label but all I can get from the label expression advanced box is "The expression contains an error. Modify the expression and try again." Tried
FormatDateTime([StartDate], 1)
and
Function ShortDate ( [StartDate] ) ShortDate = FormatDateTime([StartDate],1) End Function
where StartDate is a date item in my table formated mm/dd/yyyy For the second FormatDateTime argument, I've tired 1 and 0.
But the other thing I was trying to do to make the same label was to create a new item and use the field calculator and python to calculate the shorter date string. I thought I knew more about python but I couldn't get the syntax right. It seems like you'd use strftime, but maybe it doesn't work because the source item is already a date, not a string.