Adding date entries using the web clipper

[Dave_Lee]

Hello all

I’m a reporter who uses Airtable to keep track of big developments on the subjects I cover. When I find a relevant article, I use the clipper to pull the page title, URL and whatever text I’ve highlighted in the story into a table. It’s a nice system.

But what I can’t work out is a way to easily log the date of an article’s publication. It doesn’t seem possible to add a date field into the clipper, so at the moment, I’m writing the date manually into a short text field. That’s fine - though if I want to arrange the articles by date, or generate a timeline infographic, I’ll run into problems.

How might I work around this?

Dave

[Mohamed_Swella1]

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

[Dave_Lee]

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

[Mohamed_Swella1]

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

[Dave_Lee]

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.

[Mohamed_Swella1]

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.

[Dave_Lee]

“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.

[Mohamed_Swella1]

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.

[Dave_Lee]

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.

[Pete]

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