Technical Desk - Natural Language Dates and Times

Commence offers several ways to enter a date or time, once the field has been designated with that data type. A date can simply be typed, e.g. 1/1/03. Or you can double click on the field - what happens? A convenient calendar pops up. The same applies for time fields.

The other way to enter dates and times is using natural language - this is often overlooked and is a really powerful and time saving feature. Commence offers the unique ability to accept and process Natural Language Dates and Times, such as Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, or In One Hour.

Natural Language Dates for the Date Field

This can be a convenient alternative to specifying exact dates, as it allows dates to be specified with commonly used phrases, such as One week from today, Two months ago, and One week from next Sunday. This is particularly useful so that dates may be entered without flipping through a calendar to find the exact date. Entering a date in one of these formats causes Commence to calculate the exact date.

For example, if today's date is 1/3/95, and One week from today is entered in a date field, Commence inserts "8/3/95" into the date field when switching to another field or saving the item.

To verify that Commence has correctly interpreted what you typed, you simply tab to the next field (or save the form)

Commence will, given a vague phrase, make a best guess as to its meaning. That is, a phrase like A day after next week would evaluate the same as One week from today;

Next January would evaluate to January 1st of the following year. Remember that the phrases used should indicate an exact date.

Some phrases, such as January after next week, are too ambiguous, and will generate an invalid date error when trying to save an item that includes such a date reference.

Natural Language Times

A time field can also accept keywords in place of an exact time. For example, it is convenient to have Commence automatically insert the time into a phone log note - this is easily achieved by putting the now keyword into the time field.

In fact you can easily log the duration of calls by using two time fields, say start time and finish time. By putting start in the start time field and end in the finish time field, Commence will automatically enter the start and stop times. It is then a simple matter to have another duration field which calculates the difference between the start and stop times.

Other ways to use Natural Language Dates and Times

There are any number of ways to take advantage of natural Language Dates and Times. For example, consider a monthly forecast: say you regularly want to get a listing of opportunities for the next month. You could create a filter and specify the actual beginning date (say 1/3/03) and ending date (say 31/3/03) --- or better specify the beginning date as beginning of next month and the ending date as end of next month. Then save the view - and it will be available for all future forecasts - without having to edit the filters.

Natural language can also be useful for default values. For example a default date of today.

For more information, the Commence RM User Guide has complete details on using Natural Language Dates and Times - refer to Appendix C.