Hi! I am using Airtable to create an inventory of items in a museum of education related items. The vast majority of the items in our collection only have a year attributed to the item (i.e. class of '89, picture taken 1976, Spring 1935, etc). I am wanting to create a timeline view to show a history of certain schools, subjects, and other grouping criteria. Is there a way to have just a year (YYYY) be read as a date for timeline and gantt purposes?
+25Yes. If you use
DATETIME_PARSE(DATETIME_FORMAT({date field}, "YYYY"))
it will show up as 01/01 in the year in question. {date field} could be replaced with an actual number like "2024" (including the " " ).
Hi @KnoxMuseumEd,
If there is only one number in the description, extraction is easy.
When multiple numbers are present, more detailed conditions are required.
SWITCH(
LEN(REGEX_EXTRACT({description},"\\d{2,4}")),
2, VALUE(REGEX_EXTRACT({description},"\\d{2,4}"))+1900,
4,VALUE(REGEX_EXTRACT({description},"\\d{2,4}"))
)
+2Hi just wanna shout out. I’m using Airtable to do collection inventory for private/organization art collection too. I didn’t see a lot of use cases before so was pretty excited to see your post randomly. Would like to have more discussion in the future if you like.
I have this particular question as well and wondering if you tried the method above and does it works for timeline with the formular field?
Thanks!
+31Hm, I’m not really sure what you’re trying to do so I threw something together here
This is what my data looks like:
And this is the timeline view:
Start:
DATETIME_PARSE(Name, "YYYY")
End:
DATEADD(
DATEADD(
DATETIME_PARSE(Name, "YYYY"),
1,
'year'
),
-1,
'days'
)
+21Interesting, I kind of figured there’d be a scaling issue with the years, but the Timeline interface does support 10 year + with years as columns, so it could work.
Adam’s setup is basically the trick, though you could make the year input a number or a single select field and do the same thing if you want.
If you wanted to get real fancy and the accession year is included in your accession number string (which you have standardized to 9 digits or whatever) you could have the formula infer the year from the accession number itself and create the relevant dates to timeline.
I came to Airtable through museum work (education primarily, so not a full collections db) and am still super interested/involved with the field, so I’d love to hear any questions or trouble points you come across
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