How to use Excel to add up time

Excel by Microsoft is a great tool for accounting, categorizing content, and creating detailed records of figures or tasks. However, as well as displaying visual and static data, it can do way more to help better manage your Excel data management experience. Microsoft Excel is a useful and capable data analysis and documentation application. It is a spreadsheet application with a number of columns and rows, with each intersection of a column and a row referred to as a “cell.” Each cell carries one piece of information or one bit of data. You may make information easier to access and automatically derive information from changing data by arranging it in this manner. However, let’s assume you need to add two separate time values to obtain a total, how will you achieve this in the most effective manner. Follow through for more information on how you can achieve this.

Step by step process – How to use Excel to add up time

  1. Firstly, open your Excel document.
  2. Ensure all your times are set to AM – PM scale.
  3. Now in a new cell type the formula “=SUM(End time-Start time)”, Replace the start and end time with the corresponding cell number.
  4. Click on “Enter key”.
  5. Now select the cell.
  6. Right-click and click on “Format Cells”.
  7. Now click on “Numbers”.
  8. After that click on “Custom”.
  9. Type, “h:mm”, in the box.
  10. Press “OK”.

That’s it, once you have added in the command, cell formatting will now allow you to calculate your times in an effective manner. Note that cells need to have the correct AM – PM format — it’s better to do it this way as Excel automatically converts this to the digital format, saving you the hassle of typing out the digital hours and minutes. Okay, now! We may proceed directly to the computation by adding all of the hours in the ‘Hours Worked’ column. The equal sign must appear at the beginning of every formula. We’ll enter it in the cell where we want the outcome to display. Then we’ll proceed by entering ‘SUM,’ which indicates that we want to utilize the function to compute a total. Excel will look for the function, and we’ll confirm by double-clicking on the one we’ve chosen.

The above shows the correct format of what the timing should represent, when a sum is conducted Excel essentially users both sets of digits, mm and hh to take the final figure and display it in the cell.

As you can see the final figure shown above is 8:35 which is the number of hours and minutes between 7:45 and 4:20. You can do this with as many as you need then you can simply add the hours to calculate the weeks total.

More information about Excel time calculations

The flexibility of spreadsheet tools is one of their most helpful features. A spreadsheet can function as a database, a computation engine, a platform for statistical modeling, a text editor, a media library, a to-do list, and so on. The options are practically limitless. Spreadsheets, especially Google Sheets, are frequently used to track time, such as hourly employee time schedules or billable hours.

If you use Google Sheets to monitor time in this manner, you will frequently need to determine the difference between two timestamps, or the amount of time that transpired between two-time events. For example, if someone arrived at 9:15 a.m. and left at 4:30 p.m., they worked for 7 hours and 15 minutes. If you need to utilize Sheets for something like this, you’ll rapidly realize that it isn’t designed to perform such jobs. This is why the approach used by Microsoft in Excel is so viable for a lot more users who need to find an assuring way to keep an assertive track on time scales that are present within Excel.

Applications of time add-ups in Excel

Let’s say you are a self-employed individual who needs to run a report on hours worked for monitoring purposes. You have the time you started your work and the time you finished. You need to make a record for this at the end of the week in a quick and easy way without any mistakes. Not an issue, using Excel, you can simply plot all your times on, then use the method above to calculate the total hours.

This is our hard-working individual’s timesheet, as you can see he has put in quite a lot of effort this week, and here at business tech planet we want to help those hard workers take the stain out of work, by making complex computer-based and business based tasks just that little bit easier. For insurance why waste time using a calculator and an HB pencil calculating, why not just put the information in and let the algorithm do all the leg work. Follow through as we show you an in-depth guide to help use Excel to add up time.

In-depth – Step by step process – How to use Excel to add up time

Step by step breakdown:

  • Firstly, open your Excel document.
  • Ensure all your times are set to AM – PM scale.
  • Now in a new cell type the formula “=SUM(End time-Start time)”, Replace the start and end time with the corresponding cell number.
  • Click on “Enter key”.

The area shaded green is the final figure from the calculation. However its got the am marking, don’t worry, we can change this with some formatting.

  • Now select the cell.
  • Right-click and click on “Format Cells”.
  • Now click on “Numbers”.
  • After that click on “Custom”.
  • Type, “h:mm”, in the box.
  • Press “OK”.

Final result

That’s it you have calculated the hours between 2 sets of times.

Copy the cells down to complete the remaining 4 days and our self-employed individual now has a full list of hours completed within the week. He can go one step further and make a final calculation of the daily total to forge the weekly total.

That’s it for this Blog thank you for taking time out to read our content, please feel free to email our team about how it went if you followed the steps or if you need more help with the questions we answered in this Blog.

Saajid Gangat

Saajid Gangat has been a researcher and content writer at Business Tech Planet since 2021. Saajid is a tech-savvy writer with expertise in web and graphic design and has extensive knowledge of Microsoft 365, Adobe, Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and more! You can connect with Saajid on Linkedin.

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