Add A Timestamp to Task Lists (without Now Formula)

<div> Hello, welcome. So the question is in this vi for this video is how do I add a timestamp to done tasks? So what happens? Now what you're trying to do is you're u trying to use a now equals now. And this changes every time we edit, right? That is a difference. We can add as many as we want, but it's now and always will change on upon. To now and even a few today. The next time we edit we'll need to, it'll change if it changes the day, but what you might be doing now is like you might be doing now and then using command C and then shift command V for pace values .

And you get something like this for the date. You get something like this and you have to, we can just format this, right? But this is a little bit of. Let's do big time, but this is a little bit of a hassle, right? Like you always, this is a lot of strokes now. And then command V shift, command V, even if you use keyboard keystrokes, this is pretty darn. Problematic. And then this is always going to change even if you just use now. Okay, so how do we fix this or how do we, what's another solution? Going over to Stack Overflow , found this code and it's pretty simple. One sec.

And what this code does is it's asking us three things. Are we on the right sheet? We have to say what sheet we want to be. What column we want to do and then we'll put a timestamp in the adjacent column. Okay? What this is truly great for is if you have a certain sheet that you know, okay, of all of my worksheets or all of my tabs that I'm working on, here's the one where I want to timestamp and I have a timestamp column . So I'll show you how this works. One second, I will show you. How this works. Right now it's on sheet one and we just use hi.

And now that is a timestamp and it is not. And it is not changing as we edit, right? This now is changing. Every single time we edit, it's changing and we're putting it in timestamp . But say we wanted to only, this is really good because say we wanted to only have this if we had say this already and we're like, oh, we need to. Re-edit this or we need to put it in. We have a time simple already. We want to put it in. It is not overwriting the existing one. This is not a bug, it's a feature. It lets us know when was this created so we can create and. We can do something like that, right?

We can name it created or date created time created or timestamp , and know, hey this timestamp does not edit it only it is only created when there is nothing here, and there's something edited here. So let me walk through this with you a little bit and then I'll show you one more way you can set up a sheet for this. So what this says is, okay, we're just gonna grab what active sheet we're. If it's the sheet we name here, sheet one. Great. Go on to the next thing. We're gonna grab the cell. Are we sure that it's on column one? Are we editing column one?

And I want to point out, and I might not have pointed out yet in this video, that this is in the on edit function . On edit is, this is only gonna, there's only one on edit function for every sheet. So everything you want to do on edit needs to be in the same function . It's a little tricky if you are adding more of more functions . It's very simple here where we're only doing one thing, adding a timestamp , but when your sheets get larger and you wanna do more things on edit, you have to put them all in one function .

And I highly recommend not doing that because it slows down your sheet a little bit. But a couple things here or there or something to help you to add this timestamp to an, a really useful sheet. This is super useful. Okay, so we just, we're checking if it's on the, One that we want. We're checking that it's in the column we want that we're editing in the column.

And then right here, this offset , it's offsetting one column and then it's saying, okay, grab and check if the adjacent cell is empty or not. This means there's nothing there, so if there's something there, it's not gonna do anything. And then in the next cell we have said, okay, offset set value. And that's it. We're done. That is the entire script. What we're gonna do now is I'm gonna show you how to do this. We're gonna add, whoop, we don't want to go to the dictionary. We'll call this tasks. And we might say, status timestamp actually it might be even over here.

So we have task let's do task. Who and status and time stamp. So maybe this is a data validation and it says, list from a list of items and we're just gonna mark it done. So we just wanna mark done and we have do your day morning chores. Afternoon chores. We just want to have a timestamp here, right? So here's how we are going to do it. We're just gonna take the same code. We're gonna change this. What did we name our sheet tasks? Tasks we want, actually column three. And then this is all the same. So if we go back, let's double check this. I hope this doesn't work.

Because we change it, right? So now nothing happens here. We can delete all of this. And now I hope it works. Once we mark it done, oh, is it gonna work? It works. We can format this as what do we want to format it? Maybe just the date time. There we go. And we can then, Mark each of these done, and then we'll have the date done. Time stamp. Again, a problem with this is going to be if you do something and then you're like, oh, this isn't done yet. This time stamp's not gonna go away. You have to add more script to say, okay, if it.

Change to done then delete it, then delete what's in this one or re timestamp it, delete it and then timestamp it again. That's for a little bit more. I think actually logically you should be able to figure it out. If you have this, maybe no, you have to delete stuff. So you have to figure out how to set the value to nothing. Okay. Then maybe you can logically do that. But in this video, that's it.

We're going to create our timestamp and that is now you can have a cool timestamp that doesn't change, that you don't have to use now, and it'll change every time you do something else. Right now that's changing if you see that number changing every single time and see that one's changing every time, but all these are staying the same. So hopefully this helps you out tremendously. And let me know if you have any more questions.</div>