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Change Start Time for Date Function

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by wkhashi

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My company operates 24 hours a day, 3-shifts/day. Normal workday start time is 7:00 AM and ends at 7:00 AM the following morning. How can I override the default start time of 12:00 AM for Access functions?

3 replies

by bob sellman

I don't believe there is any way to reset the "default" start time in Access.

It would help if you explained what you are trying to accomplish. I assume that you are trying to measure the elapsed time for something. If that is the case, then all you need to do is be sure that the date is captured as part of the time. All times carry a date with them. If you don't enter a date, it is set to a default starting date (which might be 12/30/99), so if you have something with a start time of 7:00AM and end time of 3:00AM, unless the correct date is included the end time in the record will be 4 hours before the start time entered. If the correct date is included, then the Access functions to calculate differences in time will work correctly.

As an alternate, if "nothing ever" takes more than 23 hours and 59 minutes, you could take the result of the difference of subtracting the start time from the end time (DateDiff function) and if it is negative, add 24 hours to it to get the correct elapsed time.

I put "nothing ever" in quotes because that's one of those dangerous assumptions that can really mess up an application when something does violate the assumption.

by wkhashi

We operate in shifts during our normal workdays and our people who are responsible are not very computer literate. What I am trying to accomplish is to write a database program to keep track of events during the workday automatically, i.e., laboratory analyses, breakdown of equipment, etc. What is needed, for example, is proper time accounting for breakdowns that span the normal startup time for the new workday and the previous workday (3:00 AM to 10:00 AM). In this case 4 hours would be charged to the previous workday and 3 hours to the new workday. To have them do the calculation and charge the hours to the proper workdays would be defeating the purpose of having a computer to help them input data. Need to hear of other solutions that may resolve my problem. Thank you for your input.

by bob sellman

Actually, I was not suggesting that your users would do calculations and then enter the results, just that you must make sure that both the date and the time are captured.

Based on your added comment, all you have to do is when you use the starting and ending times for the calculations (which you would do in code behind the input form, presumably when the ending time is entered for a specific activity), adjust them before calculating where the hours go. Just subtract 7 hours from each time with the DateAdd function, then compute the hours to charge to each workday.

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