One of the most used office programs in companies is Microsoft Office Excel, thanks to the variety of functions that this spreadsheet has. Currently, Excel is an almost mandatory program to have a computer in the work office, and Excel is generally used to organize information and make calculations in a simple way. There are some important tricks, too, among them being able to add time units.
Excel allows you to perform all kinds of operations
And it is that Excel is a very effective tool to obtain meaningful information from large amounts of data. It also works great for simple calculations and for keeping track of almost any type of information.
The key to unlocking all this potential is the cell grid. Cells can contain numbers, text, or formulas. Data is written to cells and grouped into rows and columns. This allows you to add data, sort and filter it , put it in tables and create very visual graphs.
Precisely within the data to be managed in Excel is the time type data . These can represent a problem for many users due to the task to be carried out on them, especially everything related to the sums of hours, minutes and seconds, since when we must carry out this type of operation.
How to do it
However, Microsoft’s table calculator not only succeeds because it allows you to create tables very easily and use its many calculation functions. Probably the most used Excel function is Sum, the function allows you to quickly add different values.
But what if we don’t just want to add numbers, but rather hours and minutes? In those, the truth is that adding hours and minutes in Excel is not a simple task, since it is necessary to apply some tricks to be able to do it in the right way. If you are one of those people who first adds up the minutes and then converts them into hours, then this advice is for you.
With this, to calculate the hours, the first thing we must do is give the correct format to the cells in which we are going to enter the values. The best way to put the hours is in hh:mm format.
all keys
After the cell format, we will have a large number of options available. Now it’s just choosing the format that corresponds to what you want to do, click the OK button and it’s applied to the selected cells.
Cell formats are one of the points that you have to master yes or yes in Excel due to their versatility and because they are key to making the sheets well done and to be able to operate normally with special values such as dates. There we will have created a format of hours:minutes:seconds. If we wanted only hours and minutes, the format would have been hh:mm.
Later, to express minutes and seconds in a cell, the information must be entered using the format hh:mm:ss . This format allows us to display the exact number of hours, minutes, and seconds. If you want to enter the value of 320 minutes and 55 seconds, you must do it as follows: 0:320:55 It is important to place the leading zero so that Excel interprets the minute and second data correctly.
Format cells for minutes and seconds
Another way around this problem is to start with a time that includes a date value . This allows you to subtract very large numbers from minutes without danger of getting a negative result. If you don’t want the date to be displayed in the result, simply apply a time-only numeric format.
To have the information with the format we need, we must right-click on the cell and select the Format Cells option and, within the custom section, place the following value in the text box for Type: [mm]:ss. When accepting the changes, Excel will show the value of the cell with the format we need. In the same way you can format a list that contains information of minutes and seconds and then do the sum as if it were any other type of data.
The advantage of using this method is that when adding seconds, Excel will automatically add one minute for every 60 seconds added. We would have to do this conversion manually if we have the minutes and seconds in separate columns, although, in most cases, Excel recognizes that you have entered a time and modifies the format automatically.
