Sonny Software

I work with a lot of industrial and news magazines in my research. I'd like to have the date displayed in the list panel in a format such as yyyy-mm-dd or yyyymmdd so that I can sort articles by date. Bookends seems to be inconsistent in how it displays dates in the list panel.

Here's two screen shots from a test database which has ten JSTOR articles. All but one are journal articles. I've manually edited the dates into yyyymmdd format because Bookends will only display the year if the date is in yyyy-mm-dd format. I can live with that. The first screen shot shows that the date for the article by Sherry Olson is displayed (left panel) as 1979 although it was entered as 1979-10-01.
In the second screen shot was taken after I manually edited the date to 19791001 (the same format the other dates were edited into) the date displayed for is 1001.
I cannot understand this behavior. Any suggestions?

Tony

What is your setting in preferences for how dates are displayed (Lists tab)? If Show Entire Date is checked, 1979-10-01 should be output as is. If it's not, you should see 1979.

Realize that Bookends doesn't attempt to parse dates -- there are too many ways they can be represented when imported from online sources. So you have the option to display the year only (the default, where Bookends will try to identify a valid year) or the whole field, as entered (so 19799491 will be output as entered, as will 1979-10-01).

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon,

I missed that setting. When I set it (and then closed and opened the database) the date is now displayed properly. Thanks for the prompt response!

Tony