It appears to me that the following behave equally in the filter

> and >=  is always >=
< and <=   is always <

iow you get the same result with or without the equal sign

>Hi Bonnie,
>
>It's simpler now to get the # of messages. You can apply a filter on Date column to get messages before or after specific date. For example, messages starting with October 1st 2010
>

>>= 10/01/2010
>

>
>>
>>It's not easy to have a setting to be able to look at the messages either by month or by year, whichever the user prefers? If not, I guess I can live with it this way. I used the messages by month to be able to easily keep track of the number of posts I've made, because that's the kind of statistics that need to be gathered each year to give to my MVP Lead. But since that doesn't align with the calendar year, I kept monthly totals in a spreadsheet.