Date Column; Disable on Add

[aubreyfairlop]

Hi! Getting my head round Calibre. Three questions regarding the date columns/fields please:

1st: Is there a way to disable to automatic adding of a Date when I drop a new book into Calibre? At the moment I am manually removing this everytime I add a new book.

I looked through the settings under 'Control the adding of books' and don't see it. The publication date is what's important to me.

2nd question: can you tell me a use for this secondary Date field/column besides sorting by date added? I don't understand the function... maybe there is a valuable use case I'm not considering.

3rd question: When I manually add a Publication Date, it doesn't give me the option to just put a year, or a month and year, I have to add day, month, year... this info isn't always available. How can I add just a year?

Sincere thanks for your help and tips.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by aubreyfairlop

Hi! Getting my head round Calibre. Three questions regarding the date columns/fields please:

1st: Is there a way to disable to automatic adding of a Date when I drop a new book into Calibre? At the moment I am manually removing this everytime I add a new book.

I looked through the settings under 'Control the adding of books' and don't see it. The publication date is what's important to me.

2nd question: can you tell me a use for this secondary Date field/column besides sorting by date added? I don't understand the function... maybe there is a valuable use case I'm not considering.

3rd question: When I manually add a Publication Date, it doesn't give me the option to just put a year, or a month and year, I have to add day, month, year... this info isn't always available. How can I add just a year?

Sincere thanks for your help and tips.

See Preferences->Tweaks->Control how dates are displayed:



There are many useful features in Tweaks,

Re the Date column, I drop it from the book list and ignore it. It has occasionally been of use in tracking down my mistakes. And I believe it is used, or can be used, in Send to Device/Save to Disk operations.

BR

[ownedbycats]

You can make an Action Chain to clear it on new books.

Can't add a pubdate just by year. Use January 1st.

[theducks]

FWIW {date} is when the Calibe record was created. (id) can change under curtain conditions. AFAIK {date} can only be manually changed.
Preferences: Add your own columns: You can remove the tick and/or relocate where things appear in Grid View.

( emptying a column does not save space in the D B. Hiding only save screen space.)
Preference: Look & Feel: Book details (sidebar) allows customizing what appears in the details (and i(nfo) panes.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by theducks

( emptying a column does not save space in the D B. Hiding only save screen space.)

It does after you vacuum the database during library maintenance. Not a lot though. If you have only a few books you might not notice any change.

Calibre ID can't change. You might be thinking something else.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Calibre ID can't change. You might be thinking something else.

It does when you Copy to Library, but IIRC it keeps the source date (data)
I use an Intake Library, so the dates don't differ by much.
A long time ago, I did split off Kid friendly (no PG stuff) to a Library I could just let a youngun' loose with. (They grew up )

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by theducks

It does when you Copy to Library, but IIRC it keeps the source date (data)
I use an Intake Library, so the dates don't differ by much.
A long time ago, I did split off Kid friendly (no PG stuff) to a Library I could just let a youngun' loose with. (They grew up )

There is an option where you can have the date set to the date of the day you are copying to another library. Checked i t keeps the date. Uncheck it sets the date to the day you copied to another library.

Preferences > Adding books > Adding actions (tab) > When using the "Cop to library" action to copy books between libraries, preserve the date

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Can't add a pubdate just by year. Use January 1st.

If you set gui_pubdate_display_format to 'yyyy' you can enter 2025, IIRC the internal representation of month and day will default to 06 and 15 respectively.

BR

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by aubreyfairlop

3rd question:[/I] When I manually add a Publication Date, it doesn't give me the option to just put a year, or a month and year, I have to add day, month, year... this info isn't always available. How can I add just a year?

Sincere thanks for your help and tips.

Well, the other day I needed to do the same and I missed this possibility as well.

I have gui_pubdate_display_format = 'MMMM yyyy' on Tweaks.

So, for example, to set 'September 2013' I tried typing 09 then 2013, and I was kind of surprised this didn't work. Maybe something changed across Qt updates? Or it could be that I haven't needed to add dates manually for a long time since I changed my format display for pubdate.

The fastest I can do is:

- click dropdown
- click the Year in the calendar widget, then type 2013.
- click the month, select September then click on a random day. This action will close the widget and set the field.

As for the date column, I use it often to sort the book list, but I have a bunch of other date columns like Last Action (populated by the Last Modified plugin)

[BetterRed]

↑ ↑ ↑

Try MMM yyyy, that let's me overtype "Jan 2025" with "sep 2024' to get "Sep 2024" in the book list cells, I don't use MDE. Doesn't work with MMMM, presumably because of variable length of month names.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by aubreyfairlop

Hi! Getting my head round Calibre. Three questions regarding the date columns/fields please:

1st: Is there a way to disable to automatic adding of a Date when I drop a new book into Calibre? At the moment I am manually removing this everytime I add a new book.

I looked through the settings under 'Control the adding of books' and don't see it. The publication date is what's important to me.

2nd question: can you tell me a use for this secondary Date field/column besides sorting by date added? I don't understand the function... maybe there is a valuable use case I'm not considering.

3rd question: When I manually add a Publication Date, it doesn't give me the option to just put a year, or a month and year, I have to add day, month, year... this info isn't always available. How can I add just a year?

Sincere thanks for your help and tips.

1. No. This date field is a standard part of every book record in calibre. You can't remove it, but you can stop it being displayed.
2. Since I add a book to calibre as soon as I buy it, I use the date field as purchase date. I've found this very handy.
3. You can't. You can change the displayed date to just show a year, but only for all books, not for individual books. I tend to use 1st Jan for unknowns.

[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.