I work in an architecture firm that specializes in the design of technical education buildings; I am building a database that will be used by local colleges to keep track of all of the existing buildings on their campus.  One of our key pieces of information is the age of the existing buildings.  We use this number to determine which buildings should be renovated and which should be replaced.

One of the problems that I have is that when it comes to the age of a building, generally speaking, only the year a building was completed is recorded.  Which is fine: if I want to know how old a building is, I just subtract the year it was built from this year.  Unfortunately, Access needs a little more information than what is typically available.

The end user will be filling out this database.  As such, for the "YearBuilt" and "YearDemod" fields, I have created them as short text with a field size of 4.  Because construction projects tend to take an extended period of time, "1958" is an acceptable answer for when a building was built.  The problem I am running into, though, is when I build my query, the "Age: Int((Date()-[YearBuilt])/365.2425)" formula does not work.

I had considered changing the "YearBuilt" field to a Date/Time value with a YYYY format, but again, all of the information will be incomplete.  I suppose that the way around this is to just tell the end user to enter the date as 1/1/YYYY, but I am trying to keep this as simple as possible for the end user.

So, my question: with only the year known, is there way to calculate the age of the building without having to overcomplicate the input data that the end user needs to supply?