Count lapsed days from a manually entered date field for an issues tracker

[Denis_Scholvien]

I want to create an issues tracker base.
One column will be a manually entered submission date.
Column next to it will be “Time elapsed” field to show how long this issue has not been solved yet (in days).

How can I calculate the “time elapsed field” in days since the date entered in the “submission date field”.

I found this question here already:

Counting Days Lapsed since Date Field Ask the community

Hi! I am a complete newbie finding my way around. I have created a base to track work tasks, and want to create a field that will show the number of days that have passed since my task was issued. I have a “created time” field, but am unsure what to put in the other field to show the number of days passed since the created time… Hope this makes sense! Thanks, Cassie

But this works only with the creation date of the entry. It’s important to me that I can select the submission date manually, so this field should be a normal date field.

[W_Vann_Hall]

Denis -

If you take another look at the question you reference, you’ll see I also provided a solution for when the submission date is not necessarily the record creation date:

I’m assuming your TaskIssuedDate field is a formula field with a formula of CREATED_TIME(). If so, then your ElapsedDays field would also be a formula field, this time with a formula of TONOW(TaskIssuedDate). This will display the current number of days since the record was created.

In this case, your SubmissionDate would simply be a date field, and your elapsed time formula would be TONOW(SubmissionDate).

Hope this helps!
Vann

[Denis_Scholvien]

I looked at it but as far as I understood both the TaskIssuedDate and the ElapsedDays field are formula fields in this example. So that prevents me from being able to manually enter a date into the TaskIssuedDate (because it will always show the creation date only) I hope I’m making sense here.

What I want to do is have a date field column and the ElapsedDays field counts from that date the i entered into the date field.

[W_Vann_Hall]

Sorry – I wasn’t very clear. In your case, simply create a field called TaskIssuedDate (or SubmissionDate or whatever) of type Date. That way you can manually enter whatever the initial (start) date should be. Then create a second field, ElapsedDays, of type Formula and set the formula to TONOW(SubmissionDate) where {SubmissionDate} is the name of the field in which you enter the initial date. The calculation works the same way; it simply needs a date – either calculated or manually entered – to calculate from.

[Denis_Scholvien]

Now I finally got it. Thanks a lot, that does exactly what I was looking for.

[Alex_Montes]

I was needing the same thing, however when I did this it’s showing it in months, is there a way to show it in days only? my formula is TONOW({Date In}). I am tracking how many days something has been in inventory. And this is rounding by months, so it isn’t 100% accurate.

[W_Vann_Hall]

Wow, that’s really annoying. I’ve never used TONOW() in any of my bases, so I hadn’t realized it forced a colloquial, ‘friendly’ response.

Instead, use

DATETIME_DIFF(TODAY(),{Date In},'days')

That will give you the number of days between {Date In} and TODAY(). If you should ever need the time in a different unit than 'days', from milliseconds to years, see this list of unit identifiers.

If your responses appear slightly off, make sure both {Date In} and the formula field with the DATETIME_DIFF() function are set either to use or not to use GMT; mismatched settings will give you unexpected results.

[Alex_Montes]

That is perfect. Thank you so much. It’s exactly what I needed.

[Nestor_Estrada]

Buenos dias aguien sabe como obtener el tiempo transcurrido de una columna inicial y una columna final? esto reflejado en minutos?