My first pack: Delta Date

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Hi all,
I’ve made a pack to show the relative difference between two dates or times as a simple phrase.
Took a bit more work than anticipated but now I feel it’s finally done for its first release! :partying_face:

Some use cases:

  • This row was edited: 5 hrs ago
  • Between 5:th of March and 10:th of July there are: 18 weeks and 1 day
  • 3 November 1981 was exactly: 41y 1mo 3w 4d 11h 37m 9s ago

I’ve tried my best to make it as intuitive to as many people as possible.
Would love to hear any feedback, thank you!

Pack Listing: Delta Date

Guide: Doc with playmode

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We do these things not because we thought they would be difficult, but because we thought they would be really easy. :wink:

Congrats on getting the first one on the shelf! Now your head can explode with good reason.

Once you build that first Pack, the way you see the world of Coda suddenly changes. There are some limitations in Pack-building, but not many and that’s what makes Pack-making skills so powerful.

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Hi @Rickard_Abraham,

I am currently working with your pack.

Is it possible that the input is 1 year and 6 months and the pack returns 1.5 years?

I really appreciate your work and the pack!

Jannis

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Hey Jannis,
Thank you and thanks for the request!

I’m afraid that’s not quite what I intended the delta date pack to do, my philosophy was that precision is attained with smaller units, not decimals. Although philosophies can of course change!

But I put together a quick pure Coda experiment, with this formula we can round the year count to the nearest 0.5:

Round((thisRow.[Date 2] - thisRow.Date) / 365.25 / 0.5) * 0.5
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Hi @Rickard_Abraham,

okay, no worries!

Thanks for the Demo.

Jannis

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Greetings

I work with PDFs and OCR extensively in my document work so I have looked at your packs and thought about their implications.

They seem well done but I am not sure yet what the use case is for retrieving PDF text content and/or performing OCR on the web as opposed to locally with Adobe Acrobat or Devonthink which is my favorite on the Mac.

Could you suggest what you think the use cases are for PDF and OCR utilities on Coda rather than as prep work locally before uploading a PDF to share in a Coda doc?

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Hey, thank you for your message!

I believe the main use case is automating tasks in a collaborative workflow, saving everyone time. But honestly, I’ve been pretty focused on building solid products these past months, so I haven’t really explored many use cases yet :slight_smile:

I really appreciate your feedback though, and it’s got me thinking about creating templates for specific use cases with my packs!

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One use case we are considering contending with is one where 100s of standardized contracts and their terms have to be kept track of and should have been managed in a database but weren’t. Right now, for example, even their end dates are being missed resulting in have to rebid them and issue RFPs. Running them through Rickard’s pack and into Coda solves the massive data entry issues that are perplexing the user, so that they can begin to tackle this issue. Does that help?

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Definitely, that’s awesome! Thank you :pray:

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Glad you liked my comment about the 100s of contracts in need of tracking. What are you up to with your documents and OCR?