Programming and calculating a single field with "HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS"

[tigdupre]

I'm working on a fairly simple database to keep records of video-taped interviews with soldiers returning from deployment--"Lessons Learned" type of thing. One of the problems I'm having is being able to record an elapsed time of the video in a field as HH:MM:SS, then being able to calculate the total elapsed time for all the interview records in a specific series.

If INTERVIEW_01 is 00:30:30 in length, and
INTERVIEW_02 is 00:29:30 in length, then I want the total to read
TOTAL 01:00:00

First problem: How can I get the field to display "__:__:__" with two spaces on either side of the colons, requiring a numeric entry.

Second problem: How to perform a calculation on that field to output the total elapsed time in a report?

I am almost completely self-taught when it comes to using MS-ACCESS, and have very little programming experience. I understand the logic behind programming, and can use some formatting and concatenation techniques to get the information I want, but this little problem is out of my league.



Much appreciation in advance for any and all help!

Tig Dupre
Fort Lewis, WA

[RuralGuy]

Just a thought but the DateTime field is for recording an exact Date and Time. For elapsed time I would probably use a Long Integer and save the seconds of elapsed time. Adding them would be easier and showing each one as hour:minute:seconds could be accomplished with a User Defined Function.

[June7]

Elapsed time should be stored as a double number for calculation purposes. See post 9 in https://www.accessforums.net/access/...ime-38266.html

If stored as text in hh:mm:ss structure will need to convert to double number for calculations.

[tigdupre]

RG and June7, Many thanks for your prompt replies. I'll continue to work on the problem. One thing I am is patient!

Thanks again,

Tig Dupre