Matt,
Date fields can be filled in automatically without the need to do so via a button if that's all you need.
If you go to the field properties of "fid 59" you can set it to have a default value == today.
If you specifically want it to be just the month or the year, you could also do this using formula date fields.
- Make your date field (could probably just use the built-in field Date Created)
- Make two new formula date fields: "Current Month" and "Current Year"
- Write formulas to only display the piece of that that you want. For example, "Current Year" would be: Year( [Date Created] )
To answer your question about custom formula buttons on the dashboard, I don't believe this is possible using standard QuickBase methods. You would have to dig into some more elaborate Javascript methods to do this.