Ah hah! You are right! And I think it may even be more than that because when I was first trying it out, I was using the criteria #08/29/2017# since I didn't have the report open to get the date from, and it was still automatically deleting parentheses.
But I thought I was just not writing the variable correctly.
I do still need the variable, so I created a select query with all the same fields as the original query using the [reports]![rptPayrollChart]![PayPeriod] criteria to select the correct records first. Then I based the Left Join query off of the new one and got rid of the variable all together.
Code:
SELECT qryPayrollTotals.startdate, qryPayrollTotals.MainTasks, Sum(qryPayrollTotals.SumOfTaskHours) AS TotalSumOfTaskHours, Sum(qryPayrollTotals.TaskWages) AS SumOfTaskWagesFROM qryPayrollTotals
GROUP BY qryPayrollTotals.startdate, qryPayrollTotals.MainTasks
HAVING (((qryPayrollTotals.startdate)=[reports]![rptPayrollChart]![PayPeriod]))
ORDER BY qryPayrollTotals.MainTasks;
Code:
SELECT tblTasks.MainTasks, qryTotalTaskWagesDate.TotalSumOfTaskHours, qryTotalTaskWagesDate.SumOfTaskWages
FROM tblTasks
LEFT JOIN qryTotalTaskWagesDate
ON tblTasks.MainTasks = qryTotalTaskWagesDate.MainTasks
ORDER BY tblTasks.MainTasks;