Calculating the difference in time between two date fields

AmeriCorps_Volu · ‎Jan 29, 2019

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 · ‎Feb 05, 2019

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 · ‎Feb 05, 2019

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

Elias_Gomez_Sai · ‎Feb 06, 2019

This was not clear? :thinking:

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:

benchappell · ‎Sep 19, 2024

Hi. Has anyone managed to work out how to calculate total number of hours worked between two dates (multiple weeks sometimes) but only including working hours e.g. Mon-Fri, 0900-1700 ?