Enhancement Request: Improving Date Created Functionality

[faima_choudary 1]

I am aware of how to modify the Date Created using Note Info, to start with. Second, I've tested Challenging the feature on the iOS, WebClient, and MAC Desktop client. While they all exhibit slightly different behaviours, none of them function smoothly. Shift CMD D also allows you to add a date to the body of a note, although that method doesn't sort very well.

In my situation, I want to keep family records and photos and change the Create Date to correspond with the document's date, such as a census date, a death date, a photo, etc.

The issue -> If the year is very recent, it's not a great deal to alter using Note Info, but you can change the Date Created. To choose the correct date, one must browse through 100 years of the calendar month by month if the document is more than 100 years old. The left arrow must be used to make 1200 clicks to modify the Date Created by 100 years. Yes, you may choose the year, and it will bring up a brief list of years; however, it only goes back or ahead by around 10 years, making it laborious to travel back roughly 100 years.

Solution - (1) let the user simply manually edit the month/date/year or (2) make the date fields (month day and year) fully functionable scrollable lists so the user can scroll up / down quickly and select the appropriate date desired.

This would be much appreciated in my work! 

[Mike P 2,662]

On 7/22/2023 at 6:50 AM, faima_choudary said:

Solution - (1) let the user simply manually edit the month/date/year or (2) make the date fields (month day and year) fully functionable scrollable lists so the user can scroll up / down quickly and select the appropriate date desired.

This has been raised elsewhere and I completely agree with you. EN should be able to parse any sensible date string into a date. Or if they can't manage to do that be prescriptive about the date format required.

I can normally automate tedious activities in EN using AutoHotKey. I'm afraid this one has beaten me for all the reasons you mention and others as well. It's worth mentioning that the issue effects all date inputs, not just created date. Reminder dates and task dates are similar.

If this was a real issue for me I think I would add a iso format (y-m-d) date string at the beginning of the title of the note. That is then sortable. You can also do an intitle search for the year to narrow down your search. You obviously can't do date ranges which is the beauty of changing the created date.

intitle:1894

 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,971]

Welcome to the forums, @faima_choudary. As @Mike P says, requests like this have been made numerous times (take a look at the Windows app feature requests forum: https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/forum/731-evernote-for-windows-requests-versions-100-and-above/). Often the use case is similar to yours, to make the note's date created correspond to the creation date of an attachment. Personally, I like the date created to stick to its intended use, and I'm not sure Evernote is likely to modify this field in order to make it do something outside its intentions. Perhaps they should add an additional metadata field alongside date created and date updated, such as "date of content", and make that a searchable and sortable field. Clearly many people would find it useful.

[Mike P 2,662]

23 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Often the use case is similar to yours, to make the note's date created correspond to the creation date of an attachment. Personally, I like the date created to stick to its intended use, and I'm not sure Evernote is likely to modify this field in order to make it do something outside its intentions.

I rarely change the created date field myself. It's important to realise that it is not the ability to change the date that is the issue. You can already do that. The problem is simply the date input interface that is used wherever a date can be added or changed. It is just not very easy to the change dates unless you happen to want a day in the current month.

28 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Perhaps they should add an additional metadata field alongside date created and date updated, such as "date of content", and make that a searchable and sortable field.

This would be good and gets around the main limation of my suggestion assuming you could search for a date range. In principle you could use the reminder date in this way but you cannot currently set a reminder in the past, which is perfectly legitimate given it's intended use.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,971]

On 7/25/2023 at 4:17 PM, Mike P said:

I rarely change the created date field myself. It's important to realise that it is not the ability to change the date that is the issue. You can already do that. The problem is simply the date input interface that is used wherever a date can be added or changed. It is just not very easy to the change dates unless you happen to want a day in the current month....

This would be good and gets around the main limation of my suggestion assuming you could search for a date range. In principle you could use the reminder date in this way but you cannot currently set a reminder in the past, which is perfectly legitimate given it's intended use.

Likewise the difficulty of changing the date created seems related to its intended use. I'll have to admit that I would have thought of Evernote socks before I would have thought of changing the note creation date in order to have it serve some other purpose. Maybe I am better at accepting things as they are than I thought!