Automating a content calendar (record dates)

[jordyngum]

Hi, all!

I'm trying to automate a social media content calendar and am having issues automating the date of each record.

Every month, I'd like Airtable to create records ("Content Topics") and autopopulate the date of each record to a specific day of that current month. For example, "Content Topic #1" should be dated on the 1st day of the month, "Content Topic #2" should be dated on the 4th of the month, etc. 

Ideally, I'd also like this to have some flexibility—in that, even though it automatically creates a record with a certain date, I can manually change that date if necessary. For example, if "Content Topic #2" record is automatically given a date of "July 4, 2023" (for the month of July), I'd want to be able to manually change that specific record date to July 5 (because I don't want that post to go out on Independence Day). More simply put, I'd like this automation to have the flexibility of a "date" field as opposed to the inflexibility of a "formula"/calculated field. 

Is this possible? 

Hopefully, this makes sense, and please let me know if I can provide further explanation or clarification.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, if I were you I would create a bunch of template records to deal with this, perhaps in their own table.  In that table I would have a formula field that would calculate the date like you want, e.g. "Content Topic #1" is the 1st day etc

I would then have an automation that would run on the first of every month, and it would have:
1. A "Find Record" action that would find all the template records
2. A repeating group with a "Create Record" action that will create one record per found template record, and it would paste the date from the formula field into the "Date" field

This should do exactly what you need I think!