Personally I use airtable to track things throughout the day, and I’ve found it quite annoying to not have a time field option that is separate from the date. Of course I can enter the time manually in a single line text entry, but I think since we can enter the date without the time it only makes sense that we be able to enter the time without the date. What do you all think? Is this something you would find useful or something you have wished for?
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Do you have a formula for this? I’m in same boat and messing around with DATETIME_PARSE() but not getting anywhere. Numbers are always all jumbled up in the results
Here’s a formula that I use, based on getting the numbers out of the string
adjust column names, etc.
Column 1: Begin - single line text (ex. 13:03)
Column 2: End - single line text (ex. 15:22)
Column 3: Duration - Formula
format the field to duration, h:mm:ss (click formatting above the formula) and don’t ask me why you have to choose the option with the seconds instead of the one without, it’s just how this works for some reason …
Well here i am, two years later, and this function apparently doesn’t exist. I would like to create appointments by having a form with a selectable date and then a selectable time. Availability tables (like this one, How to make a simple booking system) do a great job when you want to create each availability manually, but it doesn’t seem like there is a way to select a date and then a time from a {time} field. Very frustrating and seemingly basic.
I realize this is an old post but let me help you understand what she wants as well as why I am on this thread. I feed airtable through a front-end interface for my small business clients. they need to select what their business hours of operation are. I would like it to be easy for them to make a selection and not have to flat type their daily open and closed hours. And on the back end, we connect their data with other platforms, but can’t have nonstandardized time entries. Just looking for a spinner select to some sort of field like below.
In my base I have a field for Date … When I used your formula , the times are correct but It populates Today’s date … I’m assuming that’s because of the “NOW” wording in your formula … I changed the now to “Date” to call in the date that’s already inside that record but it doesn’t work …
Is there a workaround?
If not … Can I hide the display date and just show the time?
Did you replace NOW() with Date or with Date()? If it’s the latter, that explains the failure because there is no Date() function. “NOW” isn’t just a “wording” as you describe. It’s the name of a function, and the parentheses immediately after it indicate the calling of the function, which is why I prefer to include them whenever referring to functions in these forum conversations.
Anyway, if you replace NOW() with Date (no trailing parentheses), and your date field is actually named “Date”, then it should work. If not, please copy and paste the exact formula that you’re trying to execute and we can more easily help to solve the problem (if it’s possible to be solved).
For time-only entry, the options are quite limited. If you don’t want to use the manual entry method from my comment above, you could create a single-select field with the available options pre-created for users to pick from. A variant on that technique would be to use a multiple-select field where the user chooses “pieces” of the full time; e.g. choosing items labeled “12”, “:00”, and “PM” which could be assembled by a formula into “12:00PM”. Admittedly that’s quite messy and prone to errors in user input, and frankly I’d be hesitant to use such a system myself, but you asked for workarounds, and that’s definitely one.
Not currently. That’s a long-requested feature that hasn’t yet been addressed, and frankly I doubt that it ever will be.
I have worked my way through this thread, as I am stumped by the same problem.
I want to create a calendar with the begin and end times of various shifts allocated to certain employees on specific days.
I have a table holding information about specific shifts, eg Shift 1- beginn 07:00 end 13:00
now there is no specific date allocated as this is just generic, usable for any day by the person making the plan for a specific week.
I have no problem calculating duration and turning the text into a date field, but the issue remains the date it uses. I would want to be able to pick a specific date and a specific time and combine it into a date field I can use in a calendar.
So I am sitting here, wanting to create say an entry for May 22 that pulls in Employee A (linked tabled) working the Shift 1 (linked table) and pulling in the start and end times automatically so we have a proper beginn and end date for the specific day of may 22, without having to type in the times each and every time.
I tried it out with the suggestions here but didn’t get anywhere near to what I need. Are there any other tricks one can use?
The two main ideas are to use a text field or a duration field, and both work. Use a text field in conjunction with DATETIME_PARSE(). Use a duration field in conjunction with DATEADD() with seconds as the units.
You may also need to include a timezone offset if you want to show the resulting date/times on a calendar in the correct local time.
