Make Start and Due Dates, and Topic Properties in date format, available in formulas

Alex G. shared this idea 3 years ago
Voting Open

At the moment Start and Due Dates cannot be directly incorporated into formulas. Similarly, any topic property formatted as a date or time field is simply not recognised by formulas. This is despite the fact that a number of task attributes related to Start and Due Dates such as Effort and Duration can be accessed.

The easiest way to fix this is to make Start and Due Dates available as a date number in formula Task Attributes similar to the way in which Excel can handle dates - and, ideally, using the same numbering system. A similar approach could be used to handle topic properties formatted as a date or time.

Replies (4)

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Another important aspect of this I forgot to mention would be to also provide TODAY as a date number which can be accessed in formulas. This would make it much easier to calculate the number of days from now until a task is due, or since it was started, etc. I know that the MAP add-in provides extended topic properties for Days to Task Start and Task Days Elapsed, etc, but TODAY should be available as numeric topic property, alongside Start Date and and Due Date.

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This would be cool!

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Why?

And How would you like to do that?

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I suggested something similar to this a few months ago: https://community.mindmanager.com/topic/162-make-start-and-due-dates-and-topic-properties-in-date-format-available-in-formulas

In summary, start and due dates should be available as numeric properties in formulas. Dates generally should be recognised and handled in a similar way to Excel, and in particular TODAY should also be available.

The extended topic properties feature in the MAP add-on from Olympic Limited goes some of the way there in showing what is possible and how this feature could be used, with properties such as Days to Task Start and Task Days Elapsed, but it does not directly provide dates as numeric properties. Other uses would include Time Value of Money (TVM) calculations which are fairly straightforward to do in MindManager but with the major limitation that you can’t use topic start and due dates to calculate duration: https://sociamind.com/2021/03/28/logic-time-and-money-some-mindmanager-formula-surprises-part-1/#more-1044

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