ClipTools: Paste Date and Paste Time

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use the Paste Date and Paste Time function in my Clip Tools App. 

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Clip Tools is my free app that you can get in the Mac App Store. It's a clipboard manager with all sorts of other functions. One of the things that you can do is the ability to Paste the date wherever it is that your typing text. So here I am in this TextEdit document. I can select Clip Tools here. Go to Paste Date and it will paste the date using this format. You could also go and use Paste Time and you get the date and time in this format. This works wherever it is that you're typing. So if you're writing an email message in Mail, if you're working in a spreadsheet in Numbers, wherever you are instead of Command V for paste to paste what is in the clipboard you can use these functions and it will paste the date or the time. 

You could also use Keyboard Shortcuts. So here I've got, under Settings, my first Global Keyboard Shortcut set to Shift Command C and activate the menu. So when I use Shift Command C it activates the menu and you could see there once I'm in the Clip Tools App, Shift Command D or Shift Command T will paste the date or time. So I could have just kept holding down Shift Command and then gone from C to D and I get the date. Shift Command C then T will paste the time. Or you can go and set another Global Keyboard Shortcut to Paste Date or Paste Time. So in this case Shift Command M will now paste the date. 

Now the key to using this feature is to set the format how you want. So let's go back into Settings here and you could see I've got the Paste Date format and the Paste Time format here. These are using coding standards for specifying the format of the Date. So capital M stands for the month without any leading zeroes. So a 1 or an 11 but not 01. d will also do the date with no leading zeroes. YY gives the year with two digits. So 23. For Time format 4 lower case y's gives the full year, 2023. Two capital M's gives the month with leading zeroes, like 02. Lower case dd will give the Date with leading zeroes, like 08. Then two capital HH's will give leading zeroes with the hour. Lower case m's will give minutes with the leading zero and lower case s's will give the seconds with a leading zero. But you can edit this format and change it to whatever you want. So, for instance, if I were to go to the Paste Date format and put 2 capital M's and 2 lower case d's I will now get leading zeroes for the two of those. So now when I go to Paste the date I get 02/08/2023 instead of 2/8/23. In addition, the slashes were put there but I could have changed those to something else, like a dash. Now when I use it you can see I get dashes instead of slashes. As you might guess there is really no different between Paste Date format and Paste Time format. I could remove the time from Paste Time format and it just becomes a second way to paste the date. Likewise, I could put time here in the date format. So these are basically just Date & Time 1 and Date & Time 2. Use them however you like. 

So that all seems easy enough. The hard part is getting the hang of the formatting. To do that go to the Instructions in Feedback Menu item there. This takes you to MacMost.com/Clip Tools. Scroll down to Paste Date, Paste Time. This will tell you a little bit more about these formats. It will give some examples right here. So you can get the date in this format. There are all sorts of other things you can do as well. Like, for instance, 4 capital E's will give you the day of the week spelled out. There is a lot more than just these examples. There is a link right here that goes to a General Reference for the unit code standards for date formats. Most, if not all of these things, should work in Clip Tools. So if you scroll down from where this link takes you you can see all of these different symbols here. It's important to look at things very carefully. For instance, if you want the number of the month it is capital M. But if I scroll down here and look for minute you could see that minute is lower case m. It's very easy to get these confused. Case will count! So if you use a lower case m as the month it is not going to work out. It's just going to show you the minute not the month. So if you're not getting what you expect from a date format be sure to check this reference very carefully. Look at the number of times with each letter and look at whether it is uppercase or lower case and match it to what you find in this table exactly. 

So here are some examples. By using 4 EEEE's I get the date of the week. By using 4 MMMM's I get the month completely spelled out. Then the minimum number of digits for the day and then the year completely written out as well. So now when I paste the date it looks like that. But if I remove one of these E's here it will abbreviate the day into three letters. The same thing with the month. So just by removing one letter from each of those now the date looks like this. If you read through all that documentation you'll also find out that there are special things like quarters. For instance, 3 capital Q's will give me the quarter with the Q in front of it. So I can have that, plus the year with 4 Y's and then it will work like this. If I want the time with leading zeroes I would use 2 capital H's, 2 lower case m's and 2 lower case s's like that. Then I get this basic format here. If I want I could change that to use lower case h's. That will give me hours but only up to 12. So 1 p.m. would be 1 instead of 13 which is what I would get with capital H's. Then I could add the letter a there and that will give me a.m. and p.m. like this. 

I could change to 1h and will cutout the leading zero, leaving the leading zero for the minute and then I could add z here and it will give me the time zone. So now I can paste the time and it gives me MST since I'm in Mountain Standard Time. Or you could use 5 x's and then this will give me the time zone adjustment like that. 

Now there is a special function that I built in here to allow you to adjust the time. Maybe you don't want the current time. But you want the time at some point in the future or the past. If you use the Pipe character, which on American keyboards is right above the Return key, you have to use shift and it is this Up and Down line and then plus or minus you could then have the number of seconds and it will adjust the time. So for instance if I do 3600 like that, that is one hour's worth of seconds. So now when I paste the time in there it's going to add 1 hour and give me the result of that. I could subtract the time as well with minus. I can do the same thing with the date here. So let me go and change to M D and then 4 yyyy's for month, date, and year. Then I could do Pipe and then + and then add 86400, which is the number of seconds in a day. Now when I use the date function I get tomorrow. A minus would have been yesterday. 

Now another thing you can do is you can include things in single quotes and it will just use those as text in the format. So you could put something like this in a single quote. Spaces are fine to be outside of quotes, just like using colons or slashes. So, it is going to put this text in here. So now when I use Paste Date it puts those words and then a space and then, since I'm adding the number of seconds for a day, it will  put tomorrow's date. If you want together a little more complex with that though then you can go to use Smart Clips, which I've done a video on before. So you can add a new Smart Clip. Then you could put whatever text you want and add a date or time wherever you wanted. So here I'm going to do curly brackets and then date colon and then give a format like M/d/yyyy. Then I'm going to do Pipe and plus add the number of seconds in a day and then I'll put a period outside of that. So this function here will work just like the Paste Date and Paste Time except in a Smart Clip. So now when I go to use this Smart Clip here I get the date for tomorrow as part of it. You can use this in any app like I said. So, for instance, remember I've got the time set to be one hour from now. So I could instead of actually typing out the time I could go to Paste Time and it will paste the time one hour from now. 

I also made sure this works in Numbers, not only when you're typing in a cell already, so you can paste the date like that, but if you just select the cell then it will work to put the date in there. So it makes it an easy way for you to add the date or the whole date and time in cells in spreadsheets. So if you had to have the date and time you certainly can use Insert and then you've got Date and Time. But you have to have the cursor blinking in there to do that in Numbers. Whereas with Clip Tools you can do it even if the cell is the only thing that is selected. 

So that is how you use the Paste Date and Paste Time functions in Clip Tools. I hope you find Clip Tools useful. Thanks for watching.