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Apr 17, 2020 04:42 PM
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
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Apr 17, 2020 09:28 PM
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
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Apr 17, 2020 10:09 PM
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
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Apr 17, 2020 11:36 PM
I mean, since you are entering the date manually, write it manually in a date field instead of a short text field.
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Apr 18, 2020 06:47 PM
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.
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Apr 18, 2020 10:05 PM
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.
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Apr 19, 2020 10:24 AM
“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.
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Apr 19, 2020 10:39 AM
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.
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Apr 19, 2020 11:04 AM
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.
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Apr 26, 2020 07:54 PM
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