I have"year installed" values (1999, 2011, ...) in a CHARACTER field. I need to get that data into a "date installed" DATE field. Best would be YYYY only in the date field, but I could work with YYYY/D/M if necessary. Is that possible?

You can use the date time converter to convert date formats. You'll need to see what date format(s) your output filetype accepts

Generally, when an attribute exists in workbench FME doesn't care whether its a string/char/int/float/date field. You can set the field type in the writer

Thanks for the reply.