How to make records non-visible after a certain time

**fdnews** · 12-22-2008, 03:31 PM

Here's the problem:

A local non-profit radio station wants to keep track of, and publish on its website, a list of local school closings due to weather. (We get a lot of snow.)

So the first part of this is pretty simple -- set up a list of local schools (75-100 in the regional listening area, a long list). Then, set up a drop-down for the main status, showing four statuses: Open | Closed | 2 Hour Delay | 1 Hour Delay.

The next part isn't too bad, either. Not all schools do one of those four things. Or, they may close for the day and add: "All afterschool and evening events are canceled, but the Board of Education meeting is still on". This is solvable with a field for free text, called Notes.

But here's the trick: Because they want to publish this to a website, they want records (rows, essentially) to "expire". Meaning, you don't want to keep seeing "The Simmons School of Cow Tipping is on a 2 hour delay" in the afternoon, when the delay has long since come and gone.

So it appears they need to be able to set an "expire" time (though not a date, as this all happens in the same calendar day, generally; even when a school will close the night before because of a predicted monster storm, it's still within a 24-hour window.).

The expire time would not be visible to readers; it would not show up on the website listing. However, it would compare the expire time to the current time of publication and determine whether a given listing should be output to the web page. (I know that the one problem with this system is that for a record to expire, a human has to remember to republish the spreadsheet to the website at some point after the expire time, unless there's a way to automate that, too.)

And, schools that are, by default, Open should not appear on the web list, either.

Ideas?

Thanks in advance.

**martindwilson** · 12-22-2008, 08:55 PM

have you looked at the now() function?
but post a workbook with what you'd like to see please

**fdnews** · 12-22-2008, 10:02 PM

I am not an Excel ninja

The now function is not something I'm familiar with.

I've attached a sample workbook to illustrate what I'm thinking about. The idea is that they input the data, then publish the list to the website MINUS any listing for a school that is open (and therefore has an empty Status field).

If that won't work, then the simple solution is for the Status field to carry the Open status by default (which I don't think is a huge problem, so long as it's accurate.)

But the trick is to make the record NOT show up on the website after the Expire time.

Thanks for taking a look!