How can you create criteria in a query to show data at the current time, or at the current hour, or an hour before now, or two hours ago, or to show data during a specific period of time?
I'm going to step back to the original question.
Date and time in Access are intertwined. A DATE variable contains both days and fractions of a day to represent a date and time. The "days" portion is the integer part of a scientific number in format DOUBLE. It is the number of days since the Access "reference" date 31-Dec-1899. Which makes 1-Jan-1900 equal to day 1. Access has an algorithm that takes that day number and turns it into a calendar date using the FORMAT function and one of the pre-defined date format options.
The "time" portion is the fractional part of the DOUBLE number showing a fraction of a day with midnight counting as 0. Thus, Noon is 0.5, 6 PM is 0.75, and so on. Again, since this is a DOUBLE, you have lot of bits to play with... enough in this case to VERY EASILY show times to the second and still have bits left over. The FORMAT function also handles this situation quite easily.
The problem with "showing data at the current time" is that it is a moving target that
changes every second. For your question to be meaningful in a practical sense, it must ALWAYS be "for a specific period of time." What is that old saying? "Time and tide wait for no man." (Geoffrey Chaucer.) The current time doesn't stand still in us and in computers.
Showing data for the current hour is easier, since there is a function called HOUR(date-variable) that will extract the hour of the day (00-23) from a date variable. Therefore you could apply an HOUR function to your values to see in which hour they fell. Note that ALL date variables have a time in them even if time wasn't explicitly stored. The time in such cases is 00 (midnight). If you store ONLY times of day in the date variable, then they all have dates of 31-Dec-1899. AND as stated earlier, all times in Access when stored in a DATE variable have an implicit date in them.
Where you would run into trouble is that if you ask for "data from two hours ago" and your night-shift person asks the question at 1 A.M., two hours ago is 11 PM of the previous day. Therefore, you would have issues as noted by Pat Hartman in post #12.
The part of your question regarding "during a specific period of time" is FAR easier. You choose two times, call them Time1 and Time2. Symbolically the solution is therefore to have a WHERE clause in your query that includes
... AND (TIMES BETWEEN TIME1 AND TIME2) ... however, getting TIME1 and TIME2 into the query might be trickier, since it would depend on exactly HOW you determine Time1 and Time2 in the first place. Note that in your original example, your column header was TIME - which for Excel makes no difference, but for Access DOES make a difference, since TIME is a reserved word. You should be able to figure out some of this from the other posts just how to get your times into the query. I don't want to second-guess you on that part of the problem.