How should durations of time be displayed in a spreadsheet? - excel

I'm creating a report which display duration of time (in hours) between two points in time.
e.g.
Duration between 10:00 to 13:30 equals 3 hrs 30 minutes
This information is being saved into a spreadsheet (excel) in one "duration" column, titled "Duration (hrs)". The column needs to be sortable to allow sorting by longest duration, etc.
Should this be displayed as 3.5 or 3.30 using a numerical column format? Or as 03:30 using a time format? Is there a standard for this or purely down to preference?
Appreciate your thoughts!
Thanks,
Andy

Note also that if you use "hh:mm" for your time format, that will just give you max 24, so even if it goes over several days, you won't see more than 24 hours. If you want the TOTAL number of hours, use "[hh]:mm" to see e.g. 45:32

I think it's probably just down to preference - either method should work and be sortable
For a time format you can just subtract, e.g.
=B2-A2
or for decimal just multiply by 24
=(B2-A2)*24
Personally I think that time durations should be kept in time format.....

Related

Calculate difference between two dates to calculate hours and minutes

I would like to get the difference in hours and minutes between two dates with the numbers after the colon in the number of minutes for a SharePoint List on SharePoint 2013. For example:
1st Date: 1/5/2019 1:00 AM
2nd Date: 1/6/2019 2:15 AM
Total: 25:15
=INT((([Date Time Test]-Created)*1440)/60) this gives total of hours. If I remove the 60, that gives total number of minutes or I have tried this: =INT((([Date Time Test]-Created)*24) which also gives the number of hours.
The way I see it, you will need three calculated columns:
one to calculate hours
one to calculate minutes
last one displays the hours & minutes
The big disadvantage of this approach is that all three columns will have to be included in the relevant views.
Second approach (depending on your SP version) - have a workflow calculate hours & minutes and output the result to a single line of text column.
Lastly you can also consider column formatting, depending on SP version again.
You could try to CONCATENATE the hours and minutes, for example:
=CONCATENATE(INT((([SDate]-Created)*1440)/60),":",INT(([SDate]-Created)*1440))

Time not in 24 hour view

I am attempting to sum up hours per day across numerous fields. The issue I am encountering is when the sum passes 24 hour it defaults to 24 hour clock so 01:00:00 for 25 hours when actually I want it to show 25:00:00. Can anyone advise on this please? Many thanks,
Depends how your data is formatted - what happens if you change the custom number format to this:
[h]:mm:ss
The time is stored as a number by Excel and it will only show from 0 to 24 hours. If you format the cell as a number it should be 1.04 which Excel sees as 1.04 days and only uses the .04 when formatted as a time. Add *24 to your calculation and you will get 25.00.
It's a little more tricky to get your desired format hh:mm:as but I'll have a go and get back to you shortly.

Working with time DURATION, not time of day

I'm doing some benchmarking, and I want to use Excel to produce graphs of the results. I've got a simple but annoying problem which is baking my noodle.
The problem is that Excel insists that "time" means a time of day. It refuses to let me work with time durations. When I try to say "three minutes and six seconds", it misinterprets this as "three minutes and six seconds past midnight", which isn't what I meant at all.
I can work around the problem by laboriously converting everything to seconds. But then all my graphs are labelled in seconds, not minutes and seconds. Plus it's a pain to have to keep typing in =3*60+6 rather than just 3:06. And once I've done it, I have to look at the formula to check whether I entered the data correctly [and didn't screw up the formula].
Does anybody know how I can make Excel work with a time duration not anchored to a specific time of day?
You can easily do this with the normal "Time" data type - just change the format!
Excels time/date format is simply 1.0 equals 1 full day (starting on 1/1/1900). So 36 hours would be 1.5. If you change the format to [h]:mm, you'll see 36:00.
Therefore, if you want to work with durations, you can simply use subtraction, e.g.
A1: Start: 36:00 (=1.5)
A2: End: 60:00 (=2.5)
A3: Duration: =A2-A1 24:00 (=1.0)
Use format d "days" h:mm:ss or [h]:mm:ss, depending on your needs.
Say you have a duration of 30h 12m 54s:
h:mm:ss -> 6:12:54 (not correct for a duration)
[h]:mm:ss -> 30:12:54
d "days" h:mm:ss -> 1 days 6:12:54
Variations are possible: I like something like d"d" h"h" mm"m" ss"s" which formats as 1d 6h 12m 54s.
The custom format hh:mm only shows the number of hours correctly up to 23:59, after that, you get the remainder, less full days. For example, 48 hours would be displayed as 00:00, even though the underlaying value is correct.
To correctly display duration in hours and seconds (below or beyond a full day), you should use the custom format [h]:mm;# In this case, 48 hours would be displayed as 48:00.
Cheers.
With custom format of a cell you can insert a type like this: d "days", h:mm:ss, which will give you a result like 16 days, 13:56:15 in an excel-cell.
If you would like to show the duration in hours you use the following type [h]:mm:ss, which will lead to something like 397:56:15. Control check: 16 =(397 hours -13 hours)/24
I don't know how to make the chart label the axis in the format "X1 min : X2 sec", but here's another way to get durations, in the format of minutes with decimals representing seconds (.5 = 30 sec, .25 = 15 sec, etc.)
Suppose in column A you have your time data, for example in cell A1 you have 12:03:06, which your 3min 6sec data misinterpreted as 3:06 past midnight, and column B is free.
In cell B1 enter this formula: =MINUTE(A1) + SECOND(A1)/60 and hit enter/return. Grab the lower right corner of cell B2 and drag as far down as the A column goes to apply the formula to all data in col A.
Last step, be sure to highlight all of column B and set it to Number format (the application of the formula may have automatically set format to Time).
Highlight the cell(s)/column which you want as Duration, right click on the mouse to "Format Cells". Go to "Custom" and look for "h:mm" if you want to input duration in hour and minutes format. If you want to include seconds as well, click on "h:mm:ss". You can even add up the total duration after that.
Hope this helps.
The best way I found to resolve this issue was by using a combination of the above. All my cells were entered as a Custom Format to only show "HH:MM" - if I entered in "4:06" (being 4 minutes and 6 seconds) the field would show the numbers I entered correctly - but the data itself would represent HH:MM in the background.
Fortunately time is based on factors of 60 (60 seconds = 60 minutes). So 7H:15M / 60 = 7M:15S - I hope you can see where this is going. Accordingly, if I take my 4:06 and divide by 60 when working with the data (eg. to total up my total time or average time across 100 cells I would use the normal SUM or AVERAGE formulas and then divide by 60 in the formula.
Example =(SUM(A1:A5))/60. If my data was across the 5 time tracking fields was the 4:06, 3:15, 9:12, 2:54, 7:38 (representing MM:SS for us, but the data in the background is actually HH:MM) then when I work out the sum of those 5 fields are, what I want should be 27M:05S but what shows instead is 1D:03H:05M:00S. As mentioned above, 1D:3H:5M divided by 60 = 27M:5S ... which is the sum I am looking for.
Further examples of this are:
=(SUM(G:G))/60 and
=(AVERAGE(B2:B90)/60) and =MIN(C:C) (this is a direct check so no /60 needed here!).
Note that your "formula" or "calculation" fields (average, total time, etc) MUST have the custom format of MM:SS once you have divided by 60 as Excel's default thinking is in HH:MM (hence this issue). Your data fields where you are entering in your times should need to be changed from "General" or "Number" format to the custom format of HH:MM.
This process is still a little bit cumbersome to use - but it does mean that your data entry is still entered in very easy and is "correctly" displayed on screen as 4:06 (which most people would view as minutes:seconds when under a "Minutes" header). Generally there will only be a couple of fields needing to be used for formulas such as "best time", "average time", "total time" etc when tracking times and they will not usually be changed once the formula is entered so this will be a "one off" process - I use this for my call tracking sheet at work to track "average call", "total call time for day".
Let's say that you want to display the time elapsed between 5pm on Monday and 2:30pm the next day, Tuesday.
In cell A1 (for example), type in the date. In A2, the time. (If you type in 5 pm, including the space, it will display as 5:00 PM. If you want the day of the week to display as well, then in C3 (for example) enter the formula, =A1, then highlight the cell, go into the formatting dropdown menu, select Custom, and type in dddd.
Repeat all this in the row below.
Finally, say you want to display that duration in cell D2. Enter the formula, =(a2+b2)-(a1+b1). If you want this displayed as "22h 30m", select the cell, and in the formatting menu under Custom, type in h"h" m"m".
What I wound up doing was: Put time duration in by hand, e.g. 1 min, 03 sec. Simple but effective. It seems Excel overwrote everything else, even when I used the 'custom format' given in some answers.

How to get the difference in minutes between two dates in Microsoft Excel?

I am doing some work in Excel and am running into a bit of a problem. The instruments I am working with save the date and the time of the measurements and I can read this data into Excel with the following format:
A B
1 Date: Time:
2 12/11/12 2:36:25
3 12/12/12 1:46:14
What I am looking to do is find the difference in the two date/time stamps in mins so that I can create a decay curve from the data. So In Excel, I am looking to Make this (if the number of mins in this example is wrong I just calculated it by hand quickly):
A B C
1 Date: Time: Time Elapsed (Minutes)
2 12/11/12 2:36:25 -
3 12/12/12 1:46:14 1436.82
I Have looked around for a bit and found several methods for the difference in time but they always assume that the dates are the same. I exaggerated the time between my measurements some but that roll over of days is what is causing me grief. Any suggestions or hints as to how to go about this would be great. Even If I could find the difference between the date and times in hrs or days in a decimal format, I could just multiple by a constant to get my answer. Please note, I do have experience with programming and Excel but please explain in details. I sometimes get lost in steps.
time and date are both stored as numerical, decimal values (floating point actually). Dates are the whole numbers and time is the decimal part (1/24 = 1 hour, 1/24*1/60 is one minute etc...)
Date-time difference is calculated as:
date2-date1
time2-time1
which will give you the answer in days, now multiply by 24 (hours in day) and then by 60 (minutes in hour) and you are there:
time elapsed = ((date2-date1) + (time2-time1)) * 24 * 60
or
C3 = ((A3-A2)+(B3-B2))*24*60
To add a bit more perspective, Excel stores date and times as serial numbers.
Here is a Reference material to read up.
I would suggest you to use the following:
Combine date to it's time and then do the difference. So it will not cause you any issues of next day or anything.
Please refer to the image with calculations. You may leave your total minutes cell as general or number format.
MS EXCEL Article: Calculate the difference between two times
Example as per this article
Neat way to do this is:
=MOD(end-start,1)*24
where start and end are formatted as "09:00" and "17:00"
Midnight shift
If start and end time are on the same day the MOD function does not affect anything. If the end time crosses midnight, and the end is earlier then start (say you start 23PM and finish 1AM, so result is 2 hours), the MOD function flips the sign of the difference.
Note that this formula calculates the difference between two times (actually two dates) as decimal value. If you want to see the result as time, display the result as time (ctrl+shift+2).
https://exceljet.net/formula/time-difference-in-hours-as-decimal-value
get n day between two dates, by using days360 function =days360(dateA,dateB)
find minute with this formula using timeA as reference =(timeB-$timeA+n*"24:00")*1440
voila you get minutes between two time and dates
I think =TEXT(<cellA> - <cellB>; "[h]:mm:ss") is a more concise answer. This way, you can have your column as a datetime.

Adding Two Times Up In Excel

I I'm have small headache caused today by excel and the way it takes control of everything. I have two time values I need to add together then divide by a value I got charged for that time to work out how much it cost me an hour.
so say I was charged day on for 12:30:00
on day 2 I was charged for 13:20:00
and day 3 I was charged for 20:30:00
In total it cost me £1000
The calculation would be
£1000 / (12:30:00 + 13:20:00 + 20:30:00 = 46:20:00)
I would guess to get the answer I would
1000 / Sum(12:30:00+13:20:00+20:30:00) = price per hour
But it doesn't...
I guess I need some sort of convert function on the time or to divide it by 24 to get hours but I'm stuck
Help would be hugely appreciated!
Excel represents times as fractional days, so your function is actually representing the rate per day.
Assuming your times are in cells A1:A3, you can adjust your function to something like:
1000 / Sum(A1:A3) / 24
which will give you the rate per hour (by my calculations, £21.58/hr).
As others have mentioned, you will need to set the cell to a currency format.
Excel should be performing the calculation correctly, but it is just showing as a time. Format the result cell as "number" instead.
You can use the HOUR and MINUTE functions to get the hour and minute portions of the time values, however as lc mentions, you do need to ensure that the formatting of the cell is set to Number, as it will default to a time.
Assuming you have your hh:mm:ss values running down the page (column A), in the next column put the formula
=(A1-INT(A1))*24
underneath this you can put your formula
= 1000 / SUM(A1:A3)
but don't forget to format it as Number.

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