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dcox-21-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 7, 2015
Solved

Shortcut for inserting current date?

  • January 7, 2015
  • 9 replies
  • 4917 views

Does anyone know if there is a quick way to enter the current date in a text field on a drawing? Something like CTRL+; as in Excel would be ideal, we often have to enter the current date multiple times on a drawing so I'm just after a way to save a bit of time. Maybe there's some mapkey magic that can be worked?

Obviously typing in "&todays_date" rather than "07/Jan/15" doesn't really help...

Thanks,

Dave


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Best answer by MartinHanak

David,

I hope that AutoIt or AutoHotkey software enables user with programming knowledge to create personal tool, which takes current time from operation system, converts it to string and put this string into edited drawing text.

Unfortunatelly I don't have enough time to develop such tool .

Martin Hanak

9 replies

Dale_Rosema
Dale_Rosema23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
January 7, 2015

You could always make a single finger multiple stroke mapkey - (e.g. "dddd") - for &todays_date - a few less key strokes, but quick for button mashers.

dcox-21-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
January 7, 2015

That does get me part of the way there - some places where the date goes are just plain table cells, so I made a slightly ropey mapkey to set the cell value to &todays_date.

However there are also places in the drawing border that report back parameters from the part (not drawing params). If I try to set the value of say the date_checked param to &todays_date, it just displays "&todays_date", not the actual date. There may be a way to change that, but I don't know it.

Because I'm not always setting the same date to the same params, trying to do some relation like date_checked = todays_date isn't really going to be of any use either.

Hence it would be nice if I could just use a brief couple of keystrokes, and have the date appear at the cursor's location. I suspect that if there is a way to do this, implementing could be more trouble than it's worth, but I thought I'd ask the question anyway and see what comes out.

dcox-21-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
January 7, 2015

Yes, provided I'm not using the clipboard for something else, which I often am.

MartinHanak24-Ruby IIIAnswer
24-Ruby III
January 8, 2015

David,

I hope that AutoIt or AutoHotkey software enables user with programming knowledge to create personal tool, which takes current time from operation system, converts it to string and put this string into edited drawing text.

Unfortunatelly I don't have enough time to develop such tool .

Martin Hanak

dcox-21-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
January 8, 2015

Hi Martin,

I know of these tools, though have never used them. It probably is the best way for what I want to do, so I'll look into it.

Thanks,
Dave

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