An intro :
A few days ago, working on one of my bases (dedicated to my pets), I requested some help to know if there was a way to track down, within Airtable, the Opening and Closing times of stores (or whatever opens and closes at some point), as the {Date} fields and {Duration} fields actually don’t allow an easy solution :thinking: .
Well, fortunately, W_Vann_Hall gave me a nice perfectly working solution for which I’m still very thankful :slightly_smiling_face: :thumbs_up: , put everything in a demo base Airtable - :clock8: Business Hours demo so I could see how it looked and gave me all the explanations so I could understand how it works.
I was well served! :winking_face:
The only tiny problem was that I needed to track down mid-day closing and opening times too :face_without_mouth: .
(From where I am, there are lots of stores that close at mid-day)
It took me quite a while, a lot of thinking :thinking: and testing and a lot of coffee :coffee: , but today, I finally can say that I succeeded :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: .
So, now that I’m finished with it, that it is ready to be implemented in my “Pets base” and while everything is still fresh in my mind :yum: , I thought that, maybe, it could interest someone here, in the future (who knows?) :winking_face: .
But, before getting into the thick of it, I need to make some remarks :
- This is a step-by-step user guide. Trying to be as clear as I can and because I don’t have the talent of W_Vann_Hall to explain those things, I’ll then repeat myself a lot (sorry :confused: ).
- I’m a big beginner in writing Airtable formulas, so there might be other and better ways to get to that same result.
If you got one, don’t hesitate to share :winking_face: . - It is not an easy solution and if some part of the one W_Vann_Hall wrote could be considered as " ugly ", well, this is worse :yum: .
But once you get your nose into it, understanding how it works, it’s not as complicated as it might seems :winking_face: . - Because of some " ugliness " of at least one formula in this demo base, if you want to adapt it to your needs/liking, I suggest you to use an external Text Editor with a function " Search & Replace ", it will save you some time :winking_face: .
- When copying/pasting formulas, be careful to not loose a bracket or a comma.
- English isn’t my mother language, sorry for my mistakes :blush: .
This step-by-step user guide will go as follow :winking_face: :
- A tiny description
- The
[Shops]table - The
[Hours]table
2. Now, how does all that works ?
- The easy part : The
[Hours]table - A quick look at the
[Shops]table
3. Let’s talk about the " very ugly " part of the [Shops] table
- Tips / Landmarks / Things you need to know
- The " very ugly " part : the
{NowOpen}formula - The " less ugly " part in
[Shops]table :{Today Open 1}∣{Today Close 1}∣{Today Open 2}∣{Today Close 2} - The " cutest " part in
[Shops]table :{Today}
And just in case you want to skip ahead all the explanations, I tried…
4. To kind of summarize all this
- What you really need to know
- What you really need to do
Now, " Into the Further we go " :winking_face: …










