In calmer times, you wrote:
[quote="michaelkenward"]I realise that I am not answering your question – an annoying habit of people who think the world should be the way they like it – but as someone who has 000,000s of PDF files, many of them filed by date, I can say that you are going to have a hard time sorting those files. Been there, done that.
The good news is that Opus has ways of easing the renaming process to create dates in this format 2012-11-25. This is the universally recognised date code (except in the US) that works fine.
So, if you can bring yourself to renaming the files, life will suddenly be a lot simpler for you.[/quote]
I appreciate the suggestion of renaming the files to yyyy-mm-dd, but there are particular reasons why I do not want to do this. To cut a long story short, it is because the filename is to be used later on for display purposes – e.g. printed at the bottom of each page of a document, listed in an index, etc. and the people reading it will expect dd-mm-yyyy format.
It may well be that the world would be a better place is everyone used yyyy-mm-dd format and, perhaps, one day that will happen. After all, we no longer write “10 minutes past 9” but rather 09.10, so perhaps someday we will all use 2013-12-25. There is an interesting Wikipedia entry showing what different countries apparently do en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
But for now, in the context in which this query arises, the file names need to be in the form dd-mm-yyyy…
One other theoretical possibility is to use the Date Modified field – i.e. set it according to the dd-mm-yyyy date at the beginning of the file and then simply list the files by sorting on that column, but, again, that is not suitable for my purposes. One reason is that Windows updates this field. So, for example, you could set the Date Modified using the prefix but then you might modify the file - e.g. it might be a scanned document, scanned in upside down: you rotate and save and that updates the Date Modified. This might sound a trivial problem but it is not just me who will be doing this – I am writing instructions for others many of whom what rather not be using a computer at all – so simplicity is at a premium.
So, to be clear, I want to be able to list files which commence dd-mm-yyyy in chronological order, without renaming them, moving them, or changing the metadata in them.
If you know how to do this in DOpus I would be very pleased to know.