Locating duplicate dates

[Rellwood]

I have 11 date columns holding each read date for a book.

Some books have actually been read 11 times, but I have about 600 books with 3 or more read dates. I get the dates from Goodreads.

The problem I am facing is that i have a total of 1100 read books and I am having a hard time locating books with duplicate dates read.

Sometimes through accident I might record the same read date twice. It is almost impossible to go through and locate them because I can't scroll down my booklist and focust on the list of DR1, DR2, DR3,DR4, etc. and look for duplicates.

Is there a way of creating a column or an icon that can show up if specific columns have the same dates?

Is there a way of setting a rule that would show if the set dates in specific columns are duplicates? Icon or Color rule? or even a yes/no?

[chaley]

Are you saying that:

• You have multiple date_read columns in each book?
• You want to know if any of these columns in a single book contain the same value?
• By "same value" do you mean exactly the same value (date & time), do you mean the same day, the same time, or do you mean something else?

This can be done with a template search. If you tell me the column lookup names and answer the above questions then I will give you an example.

Probably one of DaltonST's plugins, for example multi-column search, can do this, but I don't know how to use it.

[Rellwood]

I mean to find the same date only. Times don't matter. I think I found a long roundabout.

I am going to create a .csv catalog for each date read, then merge each catalog together so that I can simply a-z sort all the dates read into a single date column. It doesn't matter if the instances are mixed, I can just do a format column to find duplicates. I need to do it with each date instance because each book needs to show only one date in excel. I hope this makes sense. I can just go into Calibre and change the dates manually when I find them in excel.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Rellwood

I mean to find the same date only. Times don't matter. I think I found a long roundabout.

I am going to create a .csv catalog for each date read, then merge each catalog together so that I can simply a-z sort all the dates read into a single date column. It doesn't matter if the instances are mixed, I can just do a format column to find duplicates. I need to do it with each date instance because each book needs to show only one date in excel. I hope this makes sense. I can just go into Calibre and change the dates manually when I find them in excel.

So you don't need the template search? Good, that saves me some time.