It would be ‘nice’ to be able to change the format of the Edit > Insert > Current Date and Time (Ctrl-F6) result. Something less verbose; along the lines of YYYY/MM/… .
(I’d precede it with a string* in my notes/documents so I could later collect them all by year, or year and month … or day – eg, were my September 2001 thoughts written before or after the 11th?)
*Perhaps include that with the actual inserted date value. (Sorting by that stringed date value would be of use from time to time too, but that may be a step too far?)
[Scrivener, 1.9.0.0 trial version for Windows (7)]
Scrivener takes this from the Windows “Long Date” format, which you can adjust in the Clock, Language & Region settings from the Control Panel. We may change this in the future, but for now that may give you the basics of what you want. You could also try a text expansion tool like AutoHotKey or Breevy to set up a replacement/expansion that included the current date/time in your chosen format along with any other text you wanted.
Thank you MM (Jennifer),
Windows 7’s Regions and Language ‘Additional Settings’ (Customize Format) addressed my use of the long-date format in Scrivener (now yyyy-mm-dd)*, but I still need a way to make this reference date stand out from any other in the document, yet have Ctrl-F6 be of use elsewhere in the document. (Customization did not allow me to prepend a flag, eg. ‘dt:’; I could search, collect, eg. for " yyyy/", then cull, or I could bracket/parenthesize the ‘otherwise’ date, but … .)
*The format change has not (yet?) affected my other uses of date-insertion, eg. in Excel.
Which leads me to my next thought as I start my third day with Scrivener:
Discovering ‘templates’, it would be ‘nice’ were there a (new?) placeholder tag that would plug in the meta-data ‘created’ date when the template was invoked. (Thus, in the template, I could precede that tag with my flag to differentiate that date from any other that I might Ctrl-F6 into the document.)
I followed your directions to change the date format but discovered that even though the long form shows as “dddd, MMMM d, yyyy” Scrivener seems to actually use the short form which I don’t want. Can you help? Thanks, I LOVE LOVE LOVE Scrivener.
Threedogwrite …
This is the first of my threads that I’ve looked at in most of a year.
I’m now using Win10 (pro), new PC. Though I cannot vouch for my instructions, typos/punctuation/error, what I thought I had reported did work for me in Win7.
Web searching WINDOWS DATE FORMAT brought up some good directions (and as usual … others).
One that I walked through went directly to and through the Control Panel, the better route for customizing:
sysprobs.com/change-date-for … 7-ddmmyyyy
Can you finagle the format you need from those instructions?