Last Updated on Apr 17, 2020 by James W
Through the introduction of computers in the market, the routine life tasks were made easier and quicker for people in any field. The ease was in fact added through the software it came with made life easier for a common man. From basic arithmetic to complex calculations everything could be solved in a blink and with accuracy. One of the most widely used software in the field today is Microsoft Office. All the tools which are available in the package come handy to the user, if they know how to make use of it.
There are events when you are required to calculate the time in hours from one date to another. Instead of you sitting manually and counting the hours on your fingertips, you can use MS Excel to perform the calculations. Date and Time are part of the main functionalities of Excel. If you understand them, rest comes to you very easily. When you put date and time in excel, you can change it into the Excel form of date and time by simply changing the format. The date and time in Excel format is not like we see it. To make the calculations, you will first need to understand what the format is. You can learn all about the excel number from Excel Isnumber Tips which is providing huge information about it.
When you type a date in Excel it will see something like 40519. This is not the date of course but a serial number where the date has been stored to make the calculations. This format is given because the engineers working on Excel started a numbering system with dates. In windows, the serial number 1 is given to 1 Jan, 1900 and then the numbering began and is still going on till this day. So when you are writing about a date say, 7 December 2010, the serial number will be 40519. On the other hand, in Mac the numbering of dates began from 2 Jan, 1904 and is still going on.
If you want to subtract time in excel. It will be done in the form of fractions. If you type 2 PM, it will be translated to a fraction. This works according to the time serial number in Excel. If you type 0.25 in a blank cell and then change its format to time, it will be changed to something like 6 AM. You can calculate this fraction for any time value. Let’s say if you want to know how many seconds have passed from midnight till now, you can write your time value and then divide it by 86, 400 seconds a day.
There are many useful features in Excel especially when it comes to large spreadsheets and data. The hour and time function can also be used to calculate the hours a person has worked to calculate their wage as well. There are many companies which are making use of MS Excel in their routine work like Telecom Industry which gets a lot of data about their sites on daily basis and need to compile it to form charts that show the performance of their network. If Excel was not here to provide the functionalities to form these charts, it would have been certainly difficult to create charts on daily basis.
