I am working on the capstone project in of the Google Career Certificate in Data Analytics. I am using Microsoft Excel. I have to calculate the ride length based on the start and end ride times. I've inputted the formula =F2(end time)-D2(start time) which returns the ride length. Going through my entire list I have some areas where the start time is like 11pm and the end time is 1am and this is returning ###### because it is a negative number with the regular formula. I've found a modified formula that can kind of do the conversion I am looking for but it is still a bit problematic. The modified formula is =(F2-D2+(F2<D2))*24 and it seems to give an accurate ride length if I reformat the answer to number. The issue is the rest of my data is in time format and the modified ones are in number format. If I convert the number values to time, the ride length values are inaccurate.
It is tricky to make the numeric value change as well due to me using a formula. I can correct them one by one after I save Excel and it no longer stores the numbers as the formula, but there are lots of data points to change and that would be time consuming. I'm hoping to find a more concise way to solve this problem. Maybe with a better formula.
[Snippet of the chart 1
Just like everything in life, there are multiple ways to achieve things. I would have formatted the date and time into a single cell; but. if you're gathering the data from another source, that's understandable.
A simple IF statement here will work. IF the days are one apart, then take '1' day off the starting time, else do your original formula:
=IF(E4-C4=1,F4-(D4-1),F4-D4)
here's my problem:
We have an Excel sheet at work in order to manage various tasks all set on individually specified timelines - we're talking hundreds of tasks per month with dates that are currently all being maintained manually.
Let's say we have Task A and that task has a Due Date. That Task is split into several subtasks, all with their individual due dates. Date 1 would then always be Due Date - 10 days, Date 2 would be Due Date - 20 days, Date 3 would be Due Date - 17 days and so on. This then creates a neat timeline of when everything needs to be done.
That in itself would be easy enough, problem is that all of these subtasks have to be done on a specific workday as well. Meaning that subtask 1 would not only have to be done Due Date - 10 days, but it would also have to fall on a Monday - if for whatever reason Due Date - 10 would happen to fall on like a Wednesday, it would have to subtract another 2 days. And then the real problem is that Date 2 and 3 each have to fall on different workdays and Task B has an entirely different schedule again.
Now, the first thing that came to my mind was attempting to just nest a couple IFs - and I've even managed to come up with a working formula for that. Problem here is that it's so stupidly long and (thanks Excel) utterly unreadable - if for some reason someone else had to change something about it or troubleshoot the entire file 1-2 years from now, they'd probably have to spend at least an hour reconstruct how the hell any of it actually worked. Which doesn't sound particularly appealing to us.
Here's a screenshot to help illustrating the situation:
And here's a draft of the current formula that I'm really not happy with, despite it somewhat doing the job:
=IF(AND(WEEKDAY(K2-VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,3,FALSE),11)>5,VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,5,FALSE)=0),(K2-VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,3,FALSE))-(WEEKDAY(K2-VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,3,FALSE),11)-5), IF(VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,5,FALSE)=0,K2-VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,3,FALSE), IF(WEEKDAY((K2-VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,3,FALSE)),11)=0,K2-VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,3,FALSE), (VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,5,FALSE)-WEEKDAY(K2-VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,3,FALSE),11))+K2-VLOOKUP(B2,Table1,3,FALSE))))
My question is now: Does anyone have an idea how to solve this in a less confusing and unclear manner? I was trying to get something done using =CHOOSE() but ultimately ended up with the same problem of eventually having to resort to 7 IFs and dozens of LOOKUPs, making the final formula just as long. I wouldn't be disinclined towards some kind of helper table that asigns the last 7 days and their workdays to every single day of the year... but I don't think tossing another 20,000 calculated cells into a file that already has tens of thousands other calculated cells would really be a serviceable alternative... or make the situation any less obscure at all tbh.
So, anyone any idea how to go about this? Or is there really no realistic alternative than to use a bunch of IFs?
Edit: Forgot to mention that 1 special case:
There's also the situation when a date doesn't have to fall on a specific workday - in which case it's simply due date - X days. The problem here is that in those cases the dates could fall on a weekend, so the formula would have to move these dates to the previous Friday as well.
Assume you have some date and you want to "back up" ten days and then to the preceding Monday, unless the resultant date is a Monday. The general formula would be something like:
=A2-10+1-WEEKDAY(A2-10-DOW)
Where DOW translates into
Sunday=0
Monday=1
Tuesday=2
...
You should be able to modify your formulas to use this algorithm for day of the week.
If the two tables are named thisTable and keyTable, the following 365 formula is one way of implementing:
If your tables are as below, you can enter the formula in B2 and fill down and across. The references should self-adjust and return the proper dates.
Note that in keyTable, I enter the day of the week DOW as defined above, and not the textual date.
=LET(dys,VLOOKUP(thisTable[#[Task]:[Task]],KeyTable,COLUMNS($A:A)*2,FALSE),
dow,VLOOKUP(thisTable[#[Task]:{Task]],KeyTable,COLUMNS($A:A)*2+1,FALSE),
due,thisTable[#[DueDate]:[DueDate]],
IF(dow="flexible",WORKDAY(due-dys+1,-1),due-dys+1-WEEKDAY(due-dys-dow)))
If you want to have the result be the closest workday, instead of the preceding workday, then you need to add two clauses to the LET function
Calculate the subsequent workday date
Then use an IF to return the closest one to the original target
eg:
=LET(dys,VLOOKUP(thisTable[#[Task]:[Task]],KeyTable,COLUMNS($A:A)*2,FALSE),
dow,VLOOKUP(thisTable[#[Task]:[Task]],KeyTable,COLUMNS($A:A)*2+1,FALSE),
due,thisTable[#[DueDate]:[DueDate]],
dayPrev,IF(dow="flexible",WORKDAY(due-dys+1,-1),due-dys+1-WEEKDAY(due-dys-dow)),
daySubseq,IF(dow="flexible",WORKDAY(due-dys+1,-1),due-dys+7-WEEKDAY(due-dys-1-dow)),
IF((daySubseq-due+dys)>3,dayPrev,daySubseq))
I'm trying to figure out a way to create an excel spreadsheet that will allow me to keep track of how many hours I've earned per each paid holiday my company offers, then keep track of how many hours I've used and what's remaining. But I'm unsure how to calculate this properly.
I could easily do the math my self as it's a simple lay out, but I'm trying to find a way that will just let me enter the numbers for earned and used and walk away from anything else.
What I'm trying to do is the follow:
Have multiple sections. In the first section it'll be my holidays. So in like Column A, working down I'd have New Years, Memorial Day, July 4th, etc. Column B working down would be time earned. But this would be labeled in each cell as "8 Hrs" or "4 hrs". Column C would be time used in the same format "4 hrs" "8 hrs". Then Column D would simple be hours remaining.
Now in the second section I'd have holiday hours earned, which is 2 weeks. Not too sure how to lay it out, and then I still have my sick days, but not sure if I should include that in section 2 or not with the vacation time.
I'd like a way to be able to simply Calculate B2 - C2 = D2. So 8 Hrs - 4 Hrs = 4 Hrs (to show 4 Hrs remaining for each line item.)
Problem is I'm unsure how to calculate remaining time simply because of the Hrs suffix. And with that I also can't calculate total time still remaining, both for holiday hours earn and vacation/sick hours.
Yes, it's easier for me to track it as 8 Hrs rather than 1 day, etc.
Any advice on how to formulate this. Or if anyone knows of a premade template that fits this type of scenario, that I could then just take and integrate into my own spreadsheet.
Sorry if this is confusing in any way.
Also, As I'm no excel wizard, unsure if this is relevant or not, but I'm using Excel 2016, as part of the Office suite.
Another option is to just leave the number as it is and label the column accordingly. Do you really need to see "hrs" in every cell when you know you are tracking hours?
Use a custom number format of,
[>1]0 \H\r\s;[=1]0 \H\r_);0 \H\r\s;[Red]#
... and treat all hours as integers.
As requested, I have included a simplified screenshot that illustrates the issue.
As you can see, I subtracted the two dates and formatted it as "h:mm:ss". Why doesn't this give you the total amount of hours that have passed between the two dates? Is there a better way to do this? There is a great answer below, but I am trying to figure out why doing the way illustrated in this screenshot doesn't work.
END OF EDIT
I am aware that similar questions have been answered here, but for whatever reason this is not working for me at all.
I have two columns: one is a date, one is the time.
As you can see from the currently highlighted cell, the "time" column is actually stored as date with the time included. In column H, I have the date stored as a serial code so that the decimal number refers to a month, day, year, hour, minute, and second. When I subtract the serial code that refers to 2/16/2016 3:20:01 PM from the serial code that refers to refers to 2/14/2016 1:20:01 PM and format that cell as "h:mm", I am getting 2:00. Why?????
I have been hacking away at this for a while and this is supposed to be stupid easy and it's not working. Any help is greatly appreciated so I can move on to more important things.
It does work. Just take the difference between the two dates, format the cell containing the difference as Number, and then use one of the following formulas to get the units you want. I will assume that:
A1 has the value 2/16/2016 3:20:01 PM
B1 has the value 2/14/2016 1:20:01 PM
Into C1 enter A1 - B1, and format it as Number
If you want the difference as days, leave C1 as is.
If you want hours, use =24*(A1 - B1)
If you want minutes, use =24*60*(A1 - B1)
If you want seconds, use =24*60*60*(A1 - B1)
THE ANSWER TO THIS IS REALLY SILLY.
Below, you will find that Tim Biegeleisen provided an excellent answer to this question. I just wanted to further elaborate.
Sometimes having too many option for formatting can be a problem, which is what happened here.
When you subtract 2/14/2016 1:20:01 PM from 2/16/2016 3:20:01 PM and format it as h:mm:ss it only subtracts the hours portion and ignores days. You just have to somehow know that if you are trying to do what I'm trying to do, you have to format it as [h]:mm:ss and then it will calculate the total number of hours passed. The bracket around the "h" is the important part here. I hope this helps the next person who comes across this.
I've got a spreadsheet (Office 2007 version of Excel) full of text entries that are negative time values, example "-0:07" as in an employee took 7 mins less to complete a job than expected. I need to perform mathematical calculations on these entries and am looking for a more elegant formula/method than I've come up with so far.
I know about 1904 date system and * or / by 24 to convert back and forth, the problem is getting a formula that will recognize the text entry as a negative time value.
I've tried value(), *1, which both work on the text fields if the number is positive, but the "-" seems to mess those up. Even paste-special/add fails to recognize these as numbers.
Here's what I came up with that gets the job done, but it's just so ugly to me:
=IF(LEFT(E5,1)="-",((VALUE(RIGHT(E5,LEN(E5)-1)))*-1.0),VALUE(E5))
Obviously my text entry is in cell E5 in this example.
This works, so I'm not desperate for a solution, but for educational purposes (and smaller code) I'd like to know if there's a better way to this. Does anyone have a suggestion for something shorter, easier?
Thanks.
P.S. - an interesting tidbit here, I use Excel at work, but not at home, so I uploaded a sample spreadsheet to Google Docs, and it actually handles the Value() command on those entries properly. Weird, huh?
Thanks again for any suggestions.
Excel doesn't handle time spans in cells. It only deals with time. When you do "00:07" it is then converted to 0.0048611 which is the same as Jan 1st 1900 12.07 am. So if you did 2 minutes minus 7 minutes it would give at best 11.55pm.
The way you do it is the only way.