Calculating the difference in time between two date fields

[AmeriCorps_Volu]

Hey all! I have recently started using Airtable and I have been searching for an answer to this question for too long.
I am attempting to track volunteer hours. I have a form that people will complete every time they have a “shift”. This form asks people when they came in and when they left. I want to create a formula that finds the difference of the End time and the Start time in order to find the total time of their shift.
I have read through several ask the community questions similar to this and tried several formulas; including DATETIME_DIFF. However, nothing seems to be working.
Please help! Thanks in advance.

[Mike_McLaughlin]

your last post with pictures looks like it did everything correctly, the clock out times were just entered incorrectly(before start time) so you [correctly] got negative numbers.

[AmeriCorps_Volu]

I just realized that was the issue. Thank you so much for being so responsive!

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

AmeriCorps_Volunteer:

I just realized that was the issue. Thank you so much for being so responsive!

This was not clear? :thinking:

Elias_Gomez_Sainz:

Yes, you have those Starts after the corresponding Ends, instead of before (they maybe are swapped).

AmeriCorps_Volunteer:

I didn’t realize ‘*360’ had to be written with a comma

No, DATETIME_DIFF expect just a unit as the third parameter, you can’t put something like ‘hours * 3600’. Again, it was just a way of explaining that whichever unit you used (hours or minutes), you should get a correct number, and not a -0.

• If you expect to get 5 hours but you specify minutes as the unit, you’ll get 300, because 5 hours has 300 minutes.
• If you expect to get 90 minutes but you specify hours as the unit, you’ll get 1.5, because 90 minutes are equal one and a half hour

I can’t believe I am explaining this :grinning_face_with_sweat: