I have a confirmation letter that I send out that lists the names and
the times of courses that people have signed up for. Both of those two
pieces of information are in fields, but I DO NOT want to have to
place field boxes into the letter; I want to use Merge Field. I have
created a calculation whose key formula looks like this:

TimeToText(CourseTime) & ": " & CourseName

The problem is that the course time shows up as 12:30:00 which is just
about as anal as you can get! I tried adding a Left() to the formula,
but FileMaker barked at me (and besides, some of the times are at
12:30 and others at 3:00, so Left() wouldn't work).

How do I get rid of the seconds??





--
Rick Altman
The PowerPoint Live User Conference
October 12-15, 2003 | Tucson AZ
http://www.pptlive.com

Hi Rick

Don't convert the time to text within a calc. Concatenate the fields in the
merge field itself, eg:

<<Time>>: <<CourseName>>

Then format the time in the merge field using the Time command in the Format
menu.

Bridget Eley

in article 89AWa.43537$o%2.22086@sccrnsc02, Rick Altman at
rick.a (AT) nospamaltman (DOT) com wrote on 2/8/03 6:34 AM:

Use the merge fields as Bridget has suggested. Or if you really want it
all in a calc, you can try:
left(TimeToText(CourseTime), length(TimeToText(CourseTime))-2) & ":
" & CourseName

Rick Altman wrote:
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Howard Schlossberg (818) 883-2846
FM Pro Solutions Los Angeles, California
Associate Member, FileMaker Solutions Alliance

Thanks, Bridget. I should have stated initially that it will be
difficult to do that. The calculation is actually a bit more involved
than I indicated:


If(IsEmpty(Course),"No Seminar Scheduled",
If( IsEmpty(GetRepetition(Course,2)) ,
TimeToText((CourseTime)) & ": " &
Course,
TimeToText(GetRepetition(CourseTime,1))
& ": " & GetRepetition(Course,1) & "¶ " &
TimeToText(GetRepetition(CourseTime,2)) & ": " &
GetRepetition(Course,2)))


I suppose I could create two calcs instead of one and use two calc'd
fields, one for time and one for course. I'm just surprised that I
would have to do that. I really would have thought that there would be
a way to format out the seconds within the calculation.





"Bridget Eley" <bridgeteley (AT) ihug (DOT) com.au> wrote

Hi Rick

Don't convert the time to text within a calc. Concatenate the fields
in the
merge field itself, eg:

<<Time>>: <<CourseName>>

Then format the time in the merge field using the Time command in the
Format
menu.

I appreciate all of the help. In the final analysis, I scrutinized why
I was entering these times as times. I'll never be doing any
calculations against them; they are just informational. So I decided
to change the the fields to plain old text.

Problem solved... <s>




"Bridget Eley" <bridgeteley (AT) ihug (DOT) com.au> wrote

Howard suggest one calc that might help in this regard. Here is
another: