Convert Number Hours to duration

That would work, yes; but what I’m trying to do is get away from having to create specific temporary variable holding columns… ones that are only used in a very specific situation.

I’d like to get rid of those and instead cascade all of those into a single field that I can then pull the data out and force it into a specific type. There is only ever one temporary variable present at a time, it’s just that they are of different types and in order to work with them certain concessions must be made.

if I have a single temporary variable, but that temporary variable could take the form of a number, a price, a decimal, a duration; in order for me to work with any of these, they each used to require their own individual column type - but since we can convert things to a specific type, I can throw them all inside a single text column and then format that data whenever I use it using a type forcing formula.

Well, that was harder than it needed to be… here is where I ended up
MOD(FLOOR([target_drtn_hr_cnt]), 24),
(MOD(((60 * 60) * [target_drtn_hr_cnt]), (60 * 60)) / 60),
MOD(((60 * 60) * [target_drtn_hr_cnt]), 60)
- “00:00:00”
) + (FLOOR([target_drtn_hr_cnt] / 24) * 24))

It’s in this help article: DOH


Oohhh, TIME() !!
I guess that’s my DURATION() expression I was asking for?

That’s what one would call, “the long way around the barn”

a beefy expression if I ever saw one


Open to ideas lol

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Honestly, I think that’s the best one can do given the tools available… Times/dates are literally the worst.

One could say Time has always been the enemy :face_with_monocle:


Yeah, it really is painful…

You’re welcome. :slight_smile:


I love seeing how you’ve gotten in and are helping create value…
It would be really cool if there was an arena on that had just a ton of examples…
It’s always interesting to see the problems people have, and how they solve them.

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A good idea, but the curation effort to keep it concise would be substantial. :confused:

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Unless the help can be meta tagged… Then yes…

Is this formula honestly the best/only method to make durations out of numbers in hrs :anguished:

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As far as I know… LOL
The best way that i’ve thought to correct this is to allow a Unit Of Measure to be applied to number/decimal… (That would also let you see it as a label in certain places of the app…) or an expression with arguments for hours, minutes, seconds, days, weeks, months, years, etc… like DURATION([column_name], “Hours”)

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If I don’t have decimal is there a better way? If it’s only whole number hrs?

I’m not 100% but I think you can just *1.0 and it’ll force it to decimal for calcs…

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Thanks @MultiTech_Visions you’re one of my favorite Appsheeple… Come on, that’s pretty good slang…

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I mean can I avoid the *60 portions because I will never have part of a number. Numbers auto convert to decimal when doing math I believe.

If you’re never going to have a decimal portion of the hours, and you literally just need to “inject” the hours into the duration, you could do it this way:

NOW() - concatenate(left(“000” & [Hours], 3), “:00:00”)

I’m thinking that would work (but I haven’t tested that)