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Calculating Time Differences between Two Machines

Summary: If you need to compare the time on your machine with the time maintained by a server on your network, you'll be interested in the information presented in this tip. The comparison can be done, but not by any native functions available in Excel or VBA. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003, and Excel 2007.)

Don has a computer that has access to several different servers over his office network. These servers do not have their clocks synchronized, and Don was wondering if there was a way, in VBA, to determine the time discrepancy between a given server and his machine.

In order to figure out the time discrepancy, you'll need to figure out two times—one on your machine and one on the server—and then compare them. Getting the time on your own machine is easy enough; just use the Time function in VBA. Getting the time on another machine is more difficult, as there is no built-in function that facilitates this task.

You can, however, use an API function call to determine the time on a remote server. Exactly how you would develop such a function call is beyond the scope of this tip, but you can find a pretty good tutorial online for accomplishing the task:

http://www.mvps.org/access/api/api0039.htm

Take a look at the page, and you can adapt the code to fit your needs. The fGetServerTime function returns a string that contains the complete date and time. You can then use the TimeValue function in your macro to convert this string into a native Excel time value. Once converted, you can compare the value to the internal system time to determine the discrepancy you need.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3258) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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