Relative Dates/Times + Transform Cell Data with Presentation Formulas

Suggestion Box
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Suggestion: a column format displaying relative dates/times in natural language. E.g.

tomorrow
30 minutes ago
an hour ago
yesterday

I’m personally a fan of how some libraries also do…
tomorrow
Friday
Dec 31 (if more than 1 week from now)

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Good suggestion! One thing you could do now is add a new Duration column using a formula like [Time Column] - Now(). That would show you the relative offset like “2 hrs 10 mins ago”.

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Thanks Oleg. Yeah that’s what I have going on now; the main thing is that I have a lot of columns so would like to only show the relative column to users; then when they click it to edit, I would like them to be working with a regular date picker.

Perhaps this is a more general feature request:

A presentation layer on top of the data layer within a cell. What I mean is, you could apply some kind of formula that transforms the way the cell’s data is presented (converting formats, adjusting for time zones, appending/prepending text, displaying some combination of fields from a lookup from another table, etc) without affecting the underlying data in the cell. When a user goes to edit the cell, they see the underlying data pre-transformation (and can use helpful things like date pickers, drop-down selects, etc if relevant).

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Ah, in that case, at least for your scenario, it seems like something we’d have to enable on our end. I’ll put in a feature request. :slight_smile:

Interesting thoughts there on the presentation layer. Column formats (including Packs formats) currently work by applying a formula internally to the underlying data, so we already do have such a mechanism, but it’s not entirely customizable.

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Any updates on this functionality or a formula solution that might work. We’re rebuilding our workspace in Coda and it would be great for folks to see “Friday” or “Next Wednesday”.

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I’m working on a Pack for this. Any particular formats you’d like to see included @anon41940854 ?

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What I’m looking for is exactly what Notion does. The date property/column has the option to select Relative date (Today,Tomorrow, Next week) anything after that gets set as a standard date.

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