History/biography template for searchable dated events?

DEVONthink Scenarios
1

Hi there:

Sorry if this is an obvious question. I’m a new Devonthink Pro Office user looking for the most efficient way of adding notes with historical date stamps: that is, creating a database of dated events from which I can produce a chronological report that is sorted by date and allows some flexibility–e.g. includes all month-only or year-only entries in its sort (for example, 1800 … Jan 1800 … 1 Jan 1800 … 2 Jan 1800 etc).

Is there a template that facilitates this?

Thanks

Tim :slight_smile:

2

It’s probably impossible to automate this as the dates are historical. But there’s a script available in the Support Assistant to change the modification date of items, see Scripts > More Scripts > Change Date.

3

You might want to utilise the comment (or url) field for this. Enter your dates in this format:

1800
1800-01
1800-01-01
1800-01-02

You can show the comment (or url) in each list view and use it for sorting.

It is possible to write a scripts that extract the date written in plain language from the text and put it in the comments (or url) field. Scripts can also harvest through your file list and produce a text file with all events listed by name and date …

Johannes

4

Thanks Johannes. I put the dates in the comments field and it works a treat–and I learned much more about DTOP! Tim

5

I attack this problem by:

  1. following the naming convention suggested here: idlethink.wordpress.com/2011/08/ … earch-iii/

Ad

  1. taking all my notes via the “note on source” template here: muninn.net/blog/2010/08/revistin … think.html

And

  1. Making liberal use of replicants of each notecard in various conceptual folder structures.

I’ve been really happy with the results once I got the flow up and running. Extremely easy to manipulate by date whenever that matters (and to combine in smart folders and do the same thing if your conceptual folder doesn’t capture everything you need), but its basically impossible to forget to do it (unlike with tagging or metadata) because the date is part of the file name so sticks out like a sore thumb in a list if its not there