Text entered after the type is specified is examined based on the type of item being created. For tasks and appointments, the text is examined for a date specification. Text that isn’t a date specification is added to the subject of the task or appointment. Appointments are also scanned for time specification. Dates can be specified in several different forms:

3/15/09 – March 15th of 2009

3/15 – March 15 of the current year, but if the month is April or later than March 15th of next year.

Wednesday – if the day of the week is Saturday, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday than the Wednesday of the week, if Wednesday through Friday than the Wednesday of the following week

next Tuesday

1 week from Tuesday

sets the date to be 1 week from Tuesday of the week

3 days from 3/15

2 months from 4/20

5 days from 6/20

5 days from next Friday

you can specify dates to be relative to a specific day or date. A number followed by day/days/week/weeks/month/months will add the appropriate amount of time to the base date. Note that using month values change the month but assume the same day of the month. 3 months from 2/15 means 5/15.

If a task has a single date the date is assumed to be the due date and the start date is set to today. If more than 2 dates are specified, the last two are assumed to be the start and end and the others are just added to the description.

For appointments, if one date is specified it is assumed to be the start and end date. If two dates are specified, they are the start and end dates. If more than 2 dates are specified, the last two are assumed to be the start and end and the others are just added to the description.

More on adding items – times

For appointments, the entered text is also scanned for times. Times must be in the format hh:mmAM or hh:mmPM. Some examples:

5:00am

6:00AM

12:00PM

3:00PM

If a single time is entered, then the duration is assumed to be 60 minutes. If two times are entered they are assumed to be the start and end time. If more than 2 times are specified, the last two are assumed to be the start and end and the others are just added to the description.

All day Appointments

If you include the word "allday" in an appointment and don’t quote it (see below on quoting), then the appointment created will be an all day event. It will start on the start date and end on the end date and be set to "free". If only a start date is specified, then it will be a single day event.

Examples:

appt: off for my birthday tomorrow allday

appt: off site training meeting 3/10 3/13 allday

Adding items – Contacts

When adding a contact items, the text entered is scanned for email addresses and phone numbers, as well as special words. Special words indicate how to treat the next entered word. The special words are:

home – treat the next word as a home email or phone

work – treat the next word as a work email or phone

mobile – treat the next word as a mobile phone

company – treat the next word as the company name of the person

title – treat the next word as the job title of the person

homeaddress – treat the next word as the home address of the person

address – treat the next word as the business address of the person

In some of these instances, the text you need to enter is several words. Use quotes to have several words treated as a single word in these cases (see more about quotes below). For example:

person: fred jones homeaddress "5 posey lane, madison, WI 09090"

will set the home address of fred jones to the 5 posey lane, madison, WI 09090.

Here are some other examples:

person: sarah smith 999-999-9999 home [email protected]

person: jason jinks company "The Happy Place" title "Head Cheerleader" work [email protected]

If an email address or phone number is entered without a special word preceding it, it will be treated as a work email/phone number.

 

Adding items – notes

All of the text you enter is treated as the note.

Assigning categories

Categories can be specified for any item you enter in collect. Simply include one of the following, and all words after that are treated as category names:

tags=

cat=

category=

categories=

Examples:

appt: lunch today 12:00PM tags= "my time"

todo: hear from fred about the appointment friday categories= @waiting

person: john smith title ceo company "my office" cat= "boss" "@set meeting"

There is one word that is treated as special after the category special word is entered and that is the notes special word. See below for more on this.

Adding notes to an item

The appointment, task and contacts can have notes added. Simply include one of the following, and all words after that are treated as notes:

note=

note=

body=

For example:

appt: lunch with sarah 12:00 category= "review" notes= do her performance review

Will create an appointment at 12:00Pm today with the subject "lunch with sarah". It will have the category "review" and the body will contain "do her performance review". Notice that having notes special word after the category special word causes the rest of the words to be treated as notes and not categories. If you need to add more categories, you can put a category special word after the notes special word and the Collect scanning will switch back to looking for categories. Some examples:

todo: set up the planning meeting 1 week from tuesday category= @home notes= for the 2 committees category= "little league"

will create task due 1 week from Tuesday with a subject of "set up planning meeting" with 2 categories, @home and "little league" and the note for the task that says ""for the 2 committees".

Quotes

Words in quotes are treated as a single word. Further, the contents between the quotes is not examined for special words. You can created a quoted set of words in two ways. You can have the starting and ending " characters be separate words, like:

" a demonstration of quotes "

or if a word start with quotes, all of the subsequent words will be treated as quoted until a word ends with a quote, like:

"this is a good example"

If there are other quote characters between the first and last quote, these quote characters will be treated as part of the quoted text. Here are some examples of proper quoting:

"This is a good example"

" This is a good example"

"This is a good example "

" This is a good example "

Using multiple lines to enter an item

There may be times when you want to use more than one line to enter an item. This can be particularly useful when you are copying and pasting text from some other source and using it to create an item. For example, people often have "signatures" at the bottom of an email with their contact details and you might want to copy and paste that information to use to create a contact. Continuation of lines is supported by ending the lines with a backslash character : \ When using multiple line entries, a line without the \ at the end is considered to be the last part of the entry.

An example:

person: fred smith \

title ceo\

company "X Corp"\

email [email protected]\

phone 999-999-0000

This is the same as entering the single line:

person: fred smith title ceo company "X Corp" email [email protected] phone 999-999-0000

 

Multiple items

Each line of the collect screen can have a new items for creation. So you can create several different types of items at once.

 

Other things to understand

An appointment must have a start time. If no start date is given, today is assumed as the start and end date.

For a contact item, the first 2 words are treated as the name. If no text is provided before the first special item (phone number, title, etc) then an error will be reported and that entry ignored.

Credits

Advanced Mode Collect function code and documentation by Phil Shevrin.

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