Dates in imported notes

Hi, a further question on events if I may. I’m pasting in chronology data from a spreadsheet where everything is going well. But the date column is not – while the date in each item pastes into a Date field OK, that field won’t work in TimeLine. Changing the name of the column label in Numbers to StartDate will leave that field as the default (empty) once it’s in Tinderbox.

So I presumably need to copy the data from the Date field to a StartDate field for it to be useful in the TimeLine view. It’s not clear to me, though I suspect it’s simple enough, about how to do this. I’ve tried a simple rule in the prototype to make the StartDate be equal to the Date field but that doesn’t work.

Any suggestions? I am sure there’s a simple way but I’m still very much in learning mode right now. Thanks, again.

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So, the way timeline works is that it assumes things you want to plot have valid Date data in $StartDate. Optionally Date datas in $EndDate will give the note a start/end point and duration in the view.

The Timeline properties allows you to replace $StartDate/$EndDate with other Date-type attributes as the source of the start end dates.

Re the pasting, do see this and this page as it might help.

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If you can successfully import dates to a date attribute $someDate, you can easily use a rule or a stamp to copy the imported data to $StartDate

Thank you Mark (@mwra) and Mark (@eastgate), much appreciated. I know others have said this many times before but your responsiveness on this forum is really excellent and makes all the difference for people like me, aware of the limitless potential of Tinderbox but slow in clawing our way up the learning curve. Thanks again.

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