Information Management System Test ( IMS Test)

Q 1. I have a spreadsheet with two columns, one with a date, and one with a time range.

A2: CourseDate      B2: Course Time
9/7/2016            9:00 am - 9:50 am

But I need to convert it to the following: start date/time and end date/time like below.

Start Date/Time      End Date/Time
9/7/16 9:00 AM      9/7/16 9:50 AM

I tried text to columns for the time and then did a concatenate to put the date and time together. However, doing that changes the time to something like 0.375. Changing the format of the cells didn’t help either.

Assuming 
A2 = 9/7/2016
B2 = 9:00 am - 9:50 am

Which of the following will give the desired result if used as the formula for START TIME and END TIME respectively?

Q 2. I have code that works perfectly well on the Development server. But when published to the testing server, it bugs out with the following message:

"
The Entity Framework provider type 'Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.EntityFramework.EFOracleProviderServices, Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.EntityFramework, Version=6.121.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89b483f429c47342' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.Client' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. 
"

What is the Most Likely solution to this problem?

Q 3. I have a field in my Oracle database from which I would love to select everything except the last 3 characters of the field value. Example:
 
Current Value (edt_nbr)   |    Expected Result
----------------------------------- |------------------------
EDITradepartners850      |    EDITradepartners
MMCCEDI850                    |    MMCCEDI
                                           |

I tried using the left function and discovered Oracle does not have the LEFT (or RIGHT) function, but fortunately, it has the SUBSTR function which can serve similar purposes. After reading a bit about the SUBSTR function, I came up with the following query to do what I want:

SELECT edt.edi_nbr, 
       Substr(edt.edi_nbr, 1, Length(edt.edi_nbr) - 3) AS TPID 
FROM   prod.edtrdptnrs edt;

It worked perfectly while selecting edi_nbr. However, when I tried selecting another field, it did not work. I tried another and then another only to discover that it works well for some fields and doesn't work well for others. Now this is driving me crazy.

Which of the following modifications of the SUBSTR function above would make the query work on CHAR data types as well?