Copy Date to Another Field Upon Change

RyanFMurphy

Hi there,

I am looking for assistance with a use case that I can't seem to solve, so hoping someone can provide some suggestions.

I have a date field called Scheduled Date. A vendor fills in the date into this column when they plan to deliver a task. It starts out blank.

I'd like to have it so when they change a date in the Scheduled Date field, it populates the original value entered into a second column (called Original Date or something). Ideally, it wouldn't copy over every time the Schedule Date gets changed, but just if the Original Date is blank.

I've tried tinkering with Automations but no luck. It just doesn't seem like there's a way to copy a single cell. And the "record a date" action simply puts the current date into the cell. I was hoping a helper column could be an option, but it's still blocked by the lack of any ability to copy a specific cell.

Any suggestions with how to solve this? Let me know if I missed anything in my description.

Kerry St. Thomas

The way I've done this is to use multiple columns:
—[Original Date] is the FIRST scheduled date
—[Updated Date] is the date that can be changed
—[Scheduled Date] is a column formula usable for reporting, that's essentially this:
=IF(ISBLANK([Updated Date]@row),[Original Date]@row, [Scheduled Date]@row)

This layout will also allow you to do things like calculate on a per-vendor basis what the average variance is for rescheduled dates, etc.

You will just need to think about how the Original Date is populated separately from the Updated Date - this can be managed by selectively choosing fields in a Dynamic View, or by surfacing multiple reports (e.g. "New Incoming Orders" versus "Existing Orders" for your Vendors).

RyanFMurphy

Thanks for the suggestion. My hope was to have the vendor just put in the Schedule Date, as I was planning to make the Original Date hidden (therefore invisible to the vendor) and only available to me to do reporting, perhaps having a column with a function comparing the number of days between. Sorry for not including that.