[NA/NA/1932 ] 'NA' value to deal with incomplete dates

Product Feedback
1

A mixed date format scenario
I’m using Coda to organize scanned books, articles, historical documents and reference pictures.
Every scanned file has its own entry in a global ‘Content’ table, this means that I have to deal with mixed date formats.
Example: for books I can only record the year of publication, while for articles I have the full date. Also, sometimes part of the date is missing or not known.

My Workaround
My solution so far is to have separate columns for years, months and days.
But this is not very ideal:

  • waste of space
  • longer to update the columns
  • hard to work with in formulas

What about a new date format that accepts NA values?
Example: NA/NA/1932

2

ISO 8601 provides a smart built-in representation definition for this use case:
1970
1970-12
1970-12-31

I find this granularity freedom useful and I miss it in Coda. My workaround is to use plain text.
Of course some date functions couldn’t operate on this kind of data.
But some functrionality would still be welcome, such as the pop-up calendar or sorting.

Maybe introducing a specific fluid date type would help with this.