MS Access : Dealing with today's date in calcu

Question

Hi I am creating a table in MS Access to store the details of children in a school.

I have a field called YearGroup which needs to calculate the school year they are in based on their date of birth and whether they have been moved up or down a year.

I.e. if the expression deems they are six years old they should be placed in year 2. If they were moved down or up a year they should be in year 1 or 3 (this is based on another field in the table called YearModifier).

The code I have at the moment is this:

Year(Now()) - IIf(Month([DOB]) > 8, Year([DOB]) + 6 + [YearModifier], Year([DOB]) + 5 + [YearModifier])

My problem is that Year(Now()) is returning as invalid expression. Lots of websites have recognised using the Now() function and also I've tried Date() but nothing seems to be accepted by Access (The version is 2010).

What is going on? How can I get today's date in a calculated field expression?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can calculate the age of the children with a simple function:

Public Function AgeSimple( _
  ByVal datDateOfBirth As Date) _
  As Integer

' Returns the difference in full years from datDateOfBirth to current date.
'
' Calculates correctly for:
'   leap years
'   dates of 29. February
'   date/time values with embedded time values
'
' DateAdd() is used for check for month end of February as it correctly
' returns Feb. 28. when adding a count of years to dates of Feb. 29.
' when the resulting year is a common year.
' After an idea of Markus G. Fischer.
'
' 2007-06-26. Cactus Data ApS, CPH.

  Dim datToday  As Date
  Dim intAge    As Integer
  Dim intYears  As Integer

  datToday = Date
  ' Find difference in calendar years.
  intYears = DateDiff("yyyy", datDateOfBirth, datToday)
  If intYears > 0 Then
    ' Decrease by 1 if current date is earlier than birthday of current year
    ' using DateDiff to ignore a time portion of datDateOfBirth.
    intAge = intYears - Abs(DateDiff("d", datToday, DateAdd("yyyy", intYears, datDateOfBirth)) > 0)
  End If

  AgeSimple = intAge

End Function

Then your expression would be something like this (ignoring the modifier):

ClassYear: IIf(AgeSimple([DOB]) > 6, 2, 1)

Answer 2

Try creating a query with all of the fields from your table, and then add an extra field YearGroup: Year(Now()) - IIf(Month([DOB]) > 8, Year([DOB]) + 6 + [YearModifier], Year([DOB]) + 5 + [YearModifier])

It appears that Date functions can't be used in calculated columns in tables.

Answer 3

You could use this to get the year, which might work in field expressions:

format(date(),"yyyy")

About your function (which I have re-written very slightly)

Year( Now() ) 
- Year([DOB])
- IIf(  Month([DOB]) > 8
      , 6 
      , 5 )
+ [YearModifier]

however!

I don't think you want to use now(). Which year they are in depend on their age at the 1st Sept at the start of the current academic year not now! Ok now will work until 31/dec/2015, so I must assume you will not be using the function after this date!

If you are you must use 2015 not Now().

Ok?