Elapsed Time

[Charles Courtney]

I need a way to record elapsed time, specifically as hh:mm:ss of duration for my runs, swims and bike rides. The time field will not do since it records time of day rather than elapsed time. I want to be able to summarize (total and average) my times by week, month, and year, which seems not to be possible with a time of day field. Short of converting hh:mm:ss to seconds and recording the data as a number that does not display in a human understandable manner (hh:mm:ss), does anyone have a suggestion?

[Brendan]

Hi Charles,

If you use a couple of Date & Time fields to record your start and end times, then you can use a Calculation field and make a formula like [End Date] – [Start Date]. Then set the Number Format to HH:MM. There isn’t one to display the seconds. The result of the formula will be the number of seconds between those two date times. The formatter will convert the seconds to hours and minutes.

[Philip Tate]

Since I’m interested in a calculation field that displays number of days elapsed, I use $now – date then divide the result by 86,400. This works fine except it doesn’t update unless I re-enter the date. I understand that this can’t be a live update (It would have to be recalculating constantly) but something like a recalculate button or some kind of periodic timer would be a big help. Now I have to reenter the date for each record (even though I don’t change the date, it’s enough to click on the calendar icon twice.) Once I do that, the number of days displays correctly.

[Cliff Tarrance]

My question pertains to this same issue, though my requirements are different. I have two date/time fields and I have a Duration field which is the calculated difference. This works fine when there are values in both the Start and End time fields. But when I enter the Start time only, the difference is displayed as something nonsensical, such as -387162 hrs, 22 mins.

This is a problem, as I don’t always record an end time. That is, for many of the records, I don’t care what the duration is, so I don’t want to bother with entering data I don’t care about. However, for those records where I do care about the duration, the problem is that I am seeing these junk results in the records list view, and that amounts to noise that drowns out the signal.

My suggestion/request is that you might suppress calculations that involve multiple fields if any of the fields contains a null value. Thanks.

[Brendan]

Hi Cliff,

Thanks for the suggestion to tweak the calculation field. That would be a good thing to add. I’ll see what I can do. I think the null dates are being treated as January 1, 1970, hence the large durations.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Cliff Tarrance]

Hi Brendan,

Thanks! I’m another Bento refugee, and I have to say the experience on the support forum is infinitely better here! Thanks for actually caring about the users…

Cliff

[Brendan]

Hi Cliff,

You’re very welcome. I’m happy to help when I can.

Thanks!

Brendan

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