I would like to ask for further guidance on how to compare the retrieved date with a specific date.
There are multiple formats to consider... data types Date for VBA or tables or queries, and String for VBA or ShortText for tables or queries. They don't always
directly inter-compare and the use of ">=" as a comparison operator means you have to be a bit tricky.
Data type "DATE" is a numeric date that is a typecast (i.e. interpretation) of data type DOUBLE. It is possible, when both dates are in DATE format, to directly compare
IF ( Date1 >= Date2 ) Then ... and get a true/false result. Note that type DATE includes time in the mix. Therefore, if you assign a value to a DATE variable, be aware that NOW() and DATE() are two functions that would return a DATE data type, but NOW() includes time and DATE() does not. So if comparing DATE data types from different sources, be sure you know whether time is involved. That is because NOW() equals DATE() for only 1 in 86,400 seconds. Otherwise, NOW() is greater than (later than) DATE() except
exactly at midnight.
A problem comes into play when a text or string data type is involved in the comparison. When you retrieve a date, you have good odds that it came back as a formatted string. Approaches exist that would allow you to compare string-based times. The simplest method uses function CDATE() to convert a string representation of a date and time into a DATE data type for numeric comparison. In that case, you can compare
IF CDATE(StringDate1) >= CDATE(StringDate2) Then ... and again get a valid true/false result. IF you have a mixed case, the first thing to try is to compare the DATE variable against CDATE() of the STRING variable, as
IF CDATE(StringDate) >= DATEDate Then ... to manage the comparison.
The other type of comparison is possible, but requires special formatting. You see, doing a STRING compare doesn't follow numeric comparison rules. When comparing strings "2" is greater than "10" because it runs one byte at a time until the first inequality. Therefore, if you have to convert a numeric DATE variable to a string, the only format that works is
FORMAT( DATEvariable, "yyyy-mm-dd hh:nn:ss" ) to produce a date and time string looking like
2023-06-13 09:50:31 - showing IN ORDER year, month, day, hour, minute, second. In that format only, you can do a date comparison of two strings and still get a meaningful result from the ">=" operator.