Editing dates

[roger]

I have been entering dates in the format yyyy-mm-dd in the date field, but would like to copy the Month and Day to u3 for selected reference types. The first stage would appear to be simply to copy all dates unchanged into u3. Is it possible then to delete the "yyyy-" every entry, so as to leave me with u3 entries of the form mm-dd? Then I can easily do a Find and Replace to change the "1-" to "January " etc. If not, is there an alternative way of doing this?

As far as I know, every date that is not blank begins with a year, but some do not contain months and days, so have only yyyy.

It would, of course, be possible to leave u3 as yyyy-mm-dd and and then use Find and Replace in MS Word to make the necessary edits, but it would seem neater to edit the Bookends fields if that is possible. Doing this would make life easier in future as I could simply complete u3 for new entries as needed.

[Jon]

You can't do it in one pass, but you could do a Global Change -> Find and Replace in the u3 field, searching for the year and dash and replacing it with nothing. The number of times you'd need to do this depends on how many years you have in the library. But even do 50 such operations would take only a few minutes. E.g. in user3, find

2025-

replace with

[nothing]

Then do the same for

2024-
2023-
etc.

Jon
Sonny Software