Access 2000: decimal to hour and minutes

Question

In my SQL query in Access 2000, I have a field containing numbers like:

• 0,15
• 1,30
• 1
• 0,50

Where x, is the hour, and ,xx is the minutes.

I need to convert this field into a DateTime (or the Access equivalent) field, because I later need to sum on the time values in a report.

How can I convert that field into DateTime?

Answer 1

Assuming your column with numeric data is named "Num_Time" you can use this query to get a Date column with that time info:

select CDate(CStr(Fix(Num_Time)) + ':' + 
   CStr(CLng((sgn(Num_Time) * Num_Time - Fix(Num_Time)) * 100)) + ':00') as RealTime
from myTable

The query converts your column in a string of format "hh:mm:ss" which can be passed to the CDate function to get a Date object with the given time. (The query doesn't take care of null or invalid values in the column.)

Answer 2

In order to construct a DATETIME value you need a date (!!)

I'm not sure your exact usage but to aggregate the values you could consider using an INTEGER value of a certain time granule e.g. minutes:

• 0,15  ->  15
• 1,30  ->  90
• 1     ->  60
• 0,50  ->  50

Answer 3

If you time goes over a day, not sure what having a datetime is going to do for you. You need to get the total minutes and convert to hours : minutes.

Select
    CInt(Left([Num_Time],InStr([Num_Time],",")))*60 + CInt(Right([Num_Time],Len([Num_Time])-InStr([Num_Time],","))) as [Total_Minutes]
    From [Your_Table]

This turns your hours to minutes plus the other minutes. Now you just have to turn the sum of all the minutes back to hours.