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Question

TimeDiff Calc

  • September 10, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 35 views

Sean_Lake1
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Hey all,

so weirdly enough, when I setup the formula for a total time calculated it shows this:
 

120 minutes, correct?

However the resultant display shows this:

Just curious, why is it showing up as 0:02 instead of 120, even though in the sample it shows it’ll be 2?

2 replies

DisraeliGears01
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You have the formula formatted to duration h:mm, which abstracts it down to the nearest hour. If you keep it as a duration and turn it to h:mm:ss it’ll show as 2:00 instead (for two hours). If you want the actual number of minutes (120) change the formatting to number.

This all has to do with how duration fields are calculated and formatted intersecting with how Airtable calculates time (by the second) 


Alexey_Gusev
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  • Brainy
  • September 11, 2025

That’s because answer is 120, datediff outputs just number, without units.
On the other hand, Duration gets this number as ‘seconds’ and you see 2 minutes in format ‘h:mm’.  
You can see that if you add seconds.
So, if Duration wants ‘seconds’ give it ‘seconds’ (instead on ‘minutes’)