[aubreyfairlop]

I'd like to thank everyone above for your super informative and helpful replies. I have tweaked a few settings in Tweaks and found it to be a very useful set of tools, thanks for pointing it out.

What I've found works quickest for me re publication date, is to auto-lookup the book info via ISBN or the ASIN/eBook id and allow it to populate any missing fields, usually the pub date goes in with Month and YYYY where a specific day is unknown. For translated works this can get confusing - I like to know the original publication date which can sometimes be many years prior to a published translation, so I've been adding any additional dates in the notes /book description field.

For now I've just hidden the Date (added/created) column in the event I find a later use for the info and if not and I can find a particular need to, I can remove all with an action as someone helpfully pointed out.

Sincere thanks to all above.