New In Pages: The Date & Time Object

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Date and Time object in the Apple Office Apps.

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

Now there is a new feature in Pages, Numbers, and kind of in Keynote called Date & Time. Now if you look in Pages and you're using the latest version, that's version 13.1 you'll find it under Insert, Date & Time. But wait a minute, this was there before. You could go to the same place, the same menu, choose this and it would simply insert the date and time as some text. That's what seems to still do now. But it is different now. It's changed. This isn't just plain text now. This is an actual object. Look what happens when I move my pointer over it and click. It selects the entire thing even though I've just clicked on one letter in it and it comes up with this little dialogue here that I can use to change it. I can change the format, and I have a variety of formats I can choose from, and I can click on the bottom right here and use a Date & Time picker to actually change the date. I can change the time. Then you can see it is reflected up here. I also have a button set to Now. Which will change it to be exactly right now.

Then notice this other thing called Update All Fields. We'll look at that in a second. But for now it is just interesting that this is an object. It is a single element here. It still is in your text. If I were to delete it and then put something and then Insert the Date & Time and then something else after it I could select it all and I can do something like change the Font, size, or type, or style, or whatever. It changes with the rest of the text just as normal. But this is still a separate object right here. Instead of going in and editing individual characters, you could see I could move my cursor back with the left arrow key and then I get here and I do it one more time and it selects the entire thing another time and it is before it. It's just one object now. So you have this ability to change it. You know let's change it to this format right here and you could see it works like that. So, it is different than just inserting the Date and Time.

Now something else happens that's a little different. If I put another line and then Insert Date & Time again right here you could see it uses that default format there. I can go in and I can change the format on this one to something else. Let's do a full date and time like that. Let's change it to another day and another time. Then I can set it to Now again and you could see it sets it back. If I Update All Fields it will update everything with this Date & Time. So let's change it to another date there like that. The 29th. Update All Fields it changes this to the 29th. So it updates all the date and time objects throughout my entire document. Which is kind of interesting. It makes you wonder what this is meant for and think that it is probably meant for something where there is a Date & Time associated with the entire document. Like you would maybe usually use this in the Header or Footer. I could put here in the Header, for instance, I could click on that and it gives me the Insert Page Number box there. But I could just as easily Insert Date & Time and you could see now it's up there. Now when I double click on it, like that, I could change it to another format, like that, and I can include this date elsewhere, like here I've got this set to another date. I could have it, if I click there, Update All Fields and you could see how it updates this one to that. 

So say if you had different sections with different Headers. Maybe you had different places where you mentioned that this document is up to date as of this specific time and you had that in like seven different places throughout your document it's an easy way to update all seven of those places. But you don't want to use the Update All Fields if you're putting a different date and time in different date and time objects because it will update them all and you'll loose the data, whatever the date and time was for that specific object. I guess if you do it by accident you can just Undo. I'll just do Command Z here and you could see how it undoes that. So if you do make the mistake there is at least that change if you realize it to go back.

So you've got this interesting object here. It can be formatted just like anything else like I showed before. You can set a character style for it. So I can set like the emphasis character style like that. If I change the emphasis style it will change this. So it works just like other pieces of text. It's just this kind of inline special object that can be used in the body text, it can be used in Headers and Footers, it can be used in Text boxes, it can be used anywhere you use text really. That's in Pages. 

Now if we go to Numbers you have the same thing. You've got Insert Date & Time. That was there before as well. Just like before you have to be editing text for this to be active. So I just have a cell selected. Normally with a cell I could start typing something and just press a key and it starts inputting text there. But if I just click on it like that you're not quite yet in text input mode so the Insert Date & Time is not active. But if I double click on it, and you can see the blinking cursor, now I am in Text Input Mode and now I can do Insert Date & Time and now I get this special object and I can do the same thing with it. I could have it in multiple places, set time to Now, Update All Fields, the works. What is weird about it in Numbers is this isn't recognized as Date & Time. It is recognized as Text. You can see here at the bottom left. If I go to Cell, Change the data format to Date & Time, so unrelated things have the same name. This is a cell formatting Date & Time as opposed to Insert Date & Time, the menu item. Then it will change this and make it an actual value of this date here. So it is a little awkward to use this in Numbers. It's pretty much not really for entering data into cells. It's more for entering, you know, data into maybe text boxes, Headers, Footers, that kind of thing. Stuff that has to do with identifying the document, not actually having data in cells. 

Now if I Undo back to having it like this you can see it is a data object like that. Let's go and change this and you could see it's now in that format and still thinks it is just text. I could, you know, Copy and Paste this to different cells like that. You can see these are all just pieces of text. If I go in here, double click and change the time, let's say change the date to the 22nd here and then Update All Fields. You can see it is kind of buggy. It doesn't update the other ones or does it? Because if I go into here and double click on them it does change it. So it's almost like Numbers' cells themselves, the code for that is conflicting with this date and time object and it is not really working quite perfectly in Numbers. 

It gets even weirder if you go into Keynote. In Keynote you'd think this might be a good place to put a date and time. I'm going to put, like down here in this field here my name and the date and time, you know, for this presentation. I go to Insert and I can't find Date & Time anywhere. It doesn't seem like there is anyway to insert it. The feature is just not available in Keynote. Or is it? Because if I go to Pages here and I select, say, this Date & Time right here, like that. I'm going to do Command C for copy and then I'm going to switch back to Keynote. In here I'm going to do Command V to Paste. It pastes it in.  Now is that plain text. No, actually if you click on it, look, it's a Date & Time object in Keynote. But there just doesn't seem to be a way to create it in Keynote but you can Copy & Paste it from Pages into Keynote. So that's kind of interesting. 

So some other notes here. One is that another way to get to this and add Date & Time is to use the Insert button in the Toolbar. You can see Date & Time is right there. You could, of course, also go to Insert Date & Time, that's just a menu item you can add to Keyboard Shortcut in System Settings, Keyboard for that. So if it is something you need to use a lot you can create your own keyboard shortcut. The Format here, like this, Month, Day, Year, 6/15/2023 in this case, you would think that would obey the System Setting for Date Format. So if I set this to be Day, Month, Year it should be 15/6/23 but not in my tests. In my test changing the System Setting didn't change this. I just have these formats and noway to customize them and they don't obey the System Setting. 

So kind of a useful feature but you keep in mind if it doesn't work for you, you can still just type the date and time and you know put it in whatever format you want. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.