Adding date entries using the web clipper

Hi @Dave_Lee,

Why are you using a text field for the date I don’t understand? Change it to a Date field and you will be able to work with it as you wish.

BR,
Mo

Hi Mo

I did initially — but the field disappears from the web clipper if it’s formatted as a date (and when the entry appears in the table, the date cell is just blank).

Dave

I mean, since you are entering the date manually, write it manually in a date field instead of a short text field.

Not sure I’m making myself clear, sorry.

The issue is - date fields do not appear in the web clipper, so I’m unable to enter it manually.

Ah ok! Now I understand. I thought you are writing it manually in the record after clipping not in the Block.

Well, you can make another Field in your Table, set it as a formula, and it basically pulls the date from the text field and convert it into a date. DATETIME_PARSE(date, ['input format'], ['locale'])

Problem would be, probably not all the dates are in the same exact format when clipped … so that might be tricky.

I think your best option would be to have a Date field where you enter the date manually.

“I think your best option would be to have a Date field where you enter the date manually.”

I agree - though is there a reason why it doesn’t appear in the web clipper? Seems to defeat the point if I have to open up the table in order to add it.

I believe the main reason they dont support it is because all the different date formats there is which will probably screw up the clipping.

I can understand that as a reason for not auto-populating the date field with the web clipper. But I don’t see why I can’t add a blank date field for me to fill in, saving me from having to do it in the table itself. Feels like an oversight to me.

Hi @Dave_Lee,

Peter from Airtable here – it’s a fair point. We’d like to eventually support updating date fields from web clipper – for technical reasons, dates are a bit more difficult than other field types, and we opted to ship web clipper without date field support at this time.

Mohamed’s workaround looks good to me – likewise, feel free to email me at peter@airtable.com if you have any questions about it. Also, I’m checking up about when dates might be coming to web clipper, and can let you know what I learn.

Thanks, we appreciate you asking about this.
Peter

Thanks Pete - I appreciate you dropping into the thread.

Hi - I thought I had a solution with Chrome’s extension “insert timestamp” (this date was inserted with it 24/12/2021). However, no luck bc web clipper doesn’t seem to support the extension.

Perhaps you can at least allow that until you allow for a date to be prefilled?

Thanks

Hi Pete, any update on this? Like @Dave_Lee I use airtable for media research (and love it) and the lack of date field in webclipper basically renders the web clipper redundant for me. Which is such a bummer, because it would literally halve my research time. I'd find @Paola_Rojas's suggestion very useful for sourcing, but it would not address the main need that I (and I would say many people) have, which is to comment about the date information is referring to, rather than when it was retreived. 

While I still love Airtable, I've moved to Notion for doing this now. The Save To Notion chrome extension (the third party one, not the official Notion one) is fantastic -- and Notion's new AI functions are really effective in helping organize and categorize.

Hello @Pete11 , 
I use the web clipper for capturing invoices sent in my email. I'd love to be able to capture the date the invoice is sent. I'd love the ability to use a date field for back dating and setting the date without having to use automations. 
I see that this last post was 4 years ago, not sure if there's something else that i'm missing that I can do instead. 

Thanks!