Date Comparison Operators in Smart Groups

I see in the documentation that one can use date comparison operators in smart groups using:

For some reason I can’t figure out how to use this. :confused: All my tests return unexpected results.

Can it be used in the “All” field of smart searches? What date format does it expect (01012014 or 01/01/2014 or…)? Is there a way to use a relative operator (Today, Yesterday). Could someone kindly provide a working example or two?

The options relate to Date Added/Modified/etc. if you choose one of those options, it’s pretty self-explanatory (even the format expected).

Thanks for the reply. What I’m trying to do is something like:

modified > 2 weeks

so I can see a list of active cases which haven’t been touched lately.

Is there a way to do this with smart searches? Or maybe AppleScript?

(sorry if this posts twice - can’t recall if another post I typed is under moderator review, or if just forgot hit submit :slight_smile: )

Check the options for the predicate “Date Modified is …”

Yes, thank you for the response. I looked at those options which include Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week…

However, what I’m looking for is modified > two weeks ago, which none of those other criteria really fit. I would like a way to quickly identify cases in my “active files” group which have not been modified in the past couple weeks, indicating something may have been missed and should be reviewed.

So “Last Month” sort of works, but isn’t exactly right - what if it is the first of the month?

Yes, unfortunately that kind of fine tuning is not possible in smart groups with the available set of predicates :confused:

You can set up a search relevant to any calendar date or range of dates using the Advanced button in the full Search window. As the dates are fixed rather than relative, that won’t work to create a smart group based on a moving date window.

But it does work as a search and can be set up in a minute or less.

Thanks. The other issue I’ve run into is that I can’t sort out and display only top-level groups, so all the nested groups get mixed into the search results. It is sounding like an AppleScript is the way to handle this. I do see from other posts that we cannot set Smart Group criteria in AppleScript (yet).

Until then, I’ll experiment with marking “stale” cases as unread or tagging them with a special flag, and then making a smart group based on that criteria. I’ll make sure to post the script in the other forum once I get time to write it :slight_smile:

+1 to add relative dates as a new feature for smart groups. e.g., “Last Modified is within last N days”

Both Mail.app and the Finder allow such searches, and they’re very useful.

-Hankk