In 4 years of using Legend I’ve found it can nearly always do what I need – albeit not quite how I imagined. The learning curve is tough, but trying to “make it do what I want” has pushed me to better understand the tool’s capabilities. For sure, we’ll always be able to come up with more ideas – you should see some of the whoppers I’ve asked for (and even worse, the ones I haven’t!) – but as it stands today Legend is already wildly capable and flexible.

Try playing with some of the nuggets below and see if you can parlay any of them into a system that meshes with your personal workflow. Legend lets you filter on nearly everything, so it’s usually possible to build a Pane that shows you exactly what you want:

Legend stores three dates for every item automatically: created, modified, and completed. You can see them by right-clicking on any item, or by using specialty Panes (Group-by-Complete, -Modified, and -Created). They are not user-editable.
The “event” date is optional and fully editable, of course – it’s the one we usually mean when we talk about an item’s “date”. Any item with an event date can be synced to a Google Calendar. This can be set to happen automatically upon adding the date. You can sync to different calendars within the same account. These events have durations, can span multiple days, and so therefore do have an end date – but you cannot explicitly set that date as in a “due date”. Events show up as “overdue” in Agenda Panes based upon their end-date passing, not their start date…so you can kind of use this to track due-dates.
Working extensively with start/end dates is more of a Gantt chart / MS Project type of functionality, which is outside of what Legend can do. You may want to look at some of the web-based Gantting tools out there, which you can ‘connect’ to Legend by pointing both apps at the same Google Calendar. I have done this in the past (using TeamGantt), it worked rather well but ended up being overkill for what I was doing.
Calendar and Agenda panes only show items with dates. You can filter them to show or hide items based on which Google Calendar they are synced to, as well as whether they are synced to Google or are just Local.
You can filter OUT all items that have a date from any Pane, as well. This one is tricky because there isn’t a button for it, but I use it all the time. Type in to the filter text field (without the quotes): “-after: 1900”. Similarly you can filter to show only items that DO have a date, by removing the “-” from that text string.
Consider using the “Task” prefix to differentiate between items that have dates but aren’t actionable and those that are. I use this extensively; it’s quite effective. Remember you can filter any Pane to only show items that are Tasks, only items that aren’t Tasks, or all items.
There IS a one-day, full-width Calendar you can add items into directly! Create a new Board and insert a Calendar Pane. Change the Pane to 1-day display type. Drag the edge to full width. Double-click inside the calendar area to bring up a “new item” dialog box. Voila!