How to get dates out of school flyers and PDFs (without retyping)

The dates that never reach a calendar are often the ones that never arrived as text. A flyer in the book bag, a PDF that is really a photo of a poster, a permission slip with three dates in a table. Retyping the whole page is how those sit on the counter until the day has passed. You only need the lines that change your week, and your phone can copy most of them.

Do the copy the day the paper comes home. Future-you will not know which child it belonged to, or whether "Friday" meant the Friday that already happened.

Photograph the page so the words can be read

Live Text and Google Lens fail on the same kinds of photos: glare from a laminated sheet, a crease through a line, a page shot from the side so the lines slope, or four flyers in one frame. Take ten extra seconds.

• Lay the page flat and stand over it so the lines are straight. Get the corners in, then crop to the column that has the dates.
• Use daylight or a lamp to the side. Flash straight on puts a white blob where the date was.
• One page per photo, including the back. If a child is named, keep that in the frame or rename the picture the same day.

Copy the text instead of typing it

iPhone Live Text

Open the photo in Photos, tap the Live Text icon (a frame with lines in a corner), drag across the lines, and copy. Paste into a note first so you can drop the slogans and keep the dates.

Android, Google Lens

In the Google app or Google Photos, tap Lens, open the saved photo or point at the flyer, select the text, and copy. Keep the dates, the money, and what to bring.

Handwriting and poster fonts copy badly. When a line is nonsense, type only the date and the action.

Turn the copied lines into events

Most copied lines are not events. A time you must be somewhere is a timed event, with a notification 1 hour before. A form, a fee, or an order cutoff is an all-day deadline, with a notification the day before at a time you handle paper, such as 4:00pm. "Bring tissues sometime" is a task, not a block of time.

Create it on that child's Google Calendar. Title: name, then the thing, then the detail that changes the morning. Paste the original line into the description. For a fee, include the amount and the method ($15 cash, or the parent portal). Tables copy with the columns smashed together, so select one row at a time and read it back before you save.

Relative dates on paper

A flyer often has no year, and sometimes no date at all, only "a week on Friday" or "next Thursday." Count from the day you were given the paper, or from a printed date in the header or footer ("week of 6 October"). Do not count from the evening you finally cleaned the bag.

• This Friday is the Friday of the week you were given the paper. A week later, you may already have missed it.
• Next Friday might mean the coming Friday or the one after. Use a printed date if there is one. Otherwise schedule the sooner Friday and put CHECK in the title.
• A week on Friday is usually the Friday after the coming one. Write the real day and month in the title.
• A month and day with no year belongs to this school year. If that date is already past, the line may be a recap, or you may be late.

For a permission slip, the due date is the calendar event and the night before is when you sign it and pack it. Photograph the signed slip if that school loses paper.

Recycle the sheet once the event exists, unless the school wants it back. A camera roll of lunch menus is a second inbox.

The faster way

Kinboard is free and in open beta. Photograph the flyer in the app, or upload the PDF. You can also paste the text you copied with Live Text or Lens if you already have it. Kinboard reads the page and lines up events, deadlines, fees and to-dos in a review queue. You approve each one before it goes anywhere.

Approved events and deadlines sync to Google Calendar. Timed events get a reminder one hour before. Deadlines are all-day, with a reminder the day before. Each child has a color, and the event uses it. Payments and to-dos stay on the Kinboard board, not on the calendar. It is a website you can add to your home screen. There is no separate app to install.