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Finding hidden dates + date_dif formula

  • February 26, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 18 views
J

Hi all. Does Airtable track the date when someone enters data or changes data? We are using it to schedule our content calendar, and I’m trying to create a dashboard showing how long it takes to move a project through several stages, which appear as a drop-down menu.

  • does airtable track the dates somewhere invisible or do users have to manually enter the date they’ve moved to the next step?
  • if so, how do I access this data and set up a formula to show the average number of days between steps over a monthly period? (and then display this in a dashboard)

Thanks so much for your help!
Joanna

1 reply

J
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Well, the answer is sort of… in two different ways… neither of which is really going to meet your needs, sadly.

The first way that Airtable tracks changes is in the record revision history:

This history can be viewed on the right-hand side of an expanded record, in the same stream as the record comments. Every change to a record is tracked there. However, you have no access to that data for use in building a blocks dashboard, or any other sort of dashboard.

The second way you can track changes is through a “Last modified time” field, where you can store a single, rolling time-stamp of the last change made either to any field in the record, or a particular field, or a particular set of fields in a record:

However, supposing you have a Single Select field that you use to move a record through “phases” or “stages”, and you setup a “Last modified time” field to track that particular field, the time-stamp in that field will overwrite itself with each change to the Single Select field, so you won’t have a “history” of those time-stamps available for a dashboard – only the most recent. Perhaps that is at least a little useful for your use-case :man_shrugging:t2: .

Luckily, the winds of change are bringing other tools down the pipeline within Airtable that will make what you are wanting possible in the future. But not yet.

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