While working in Excel some times you may need to convert time into decimals, hours or minutes for easy calculation. For example if you are paid per hour you may need to multiply the total hours worked by your hourly pay.
That means you need to convert all the time into hours. The best way to go about this is to convert time to decimal after subtraction.
Decimals make sure you do not lose money for the minutes that did not make an hour. Instead these minutes will be calculaated as a decimal.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to convert time into decimals, hours or minutes in Excel.
How to convert time to Decimals
Converting time to a decimal is very straight foward. You just need to convert the time into either, hours minutes or seconds by multiplying by its respective units.
However, its important to make sure that the target that will display the decimals is formatted as Numbers.
Example
Take a look at how you can convert 9:30 Into Hours.
1. Right click on the cell where you want to display the decimal
2. Select format cells
3. Under the number tab click on Number, set your preferred number of decimal places and click ok to apply changes.
4. On the target cells multiply the time by 24 and press okay to get time in decimal
Here is a summary on how to convert time into decimals
- In order to convert time to hours, multiply the given time by 24 which stands for the total number of hours in a day.
- In order to convert a time to minutes in Excel, you need to multiply it with 1440 which is the total number of minutes in a day.
- Lastly in order to convert Time in Excel to Seconds you need to multiply it with 86,400 which is the total number of seconds in a day.
How to convert time to Hours
The easiest way to convert time to hours in Excel is by Multiplying by 24. Take a look at the example below.
1. Select the targe cell or cells that will hold the hours.
2. Right click on them and select format cells. You can also use the shortcut CTRL+1
3. Under the number tab click on number and set the decimal places you want to have in your hours
4. Click okay to save changes
5. Now multiply the time by 24.
6. You can drag down or double click on the fill handle to automatically convert the remaining time to hours
How to convert time to Minutes
1. Select the targe cell or cells that will hold the minutes.
2. Right click on them and select format cells. You can also use the shortcut CTRL+1
3. Under the number tab click on number and set the decimal places you want to have in your minutes
4. Click okay to save changes
5. Now multiply the time by 1440. (This stands for the total number of hours in day) Since we have 24 hours in a day when you multiply by 60 you get 1440 minutes.
6. Drag down the fill handle to automatically compute the remaining time to minutes
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How to Convert Time to Seconds In Excel
1. Select the targe cell or cells that will hold the seconds.
2. Right click on them and select format cells. You can also use the shortcut CTRL+1
3. Under the number tab click on number and set the decimal places you want to have in your seconds
4. Click okay to save changes
5. Now multiply the time by 86,400 (This is the total number of seconds in a day). The number of minutes in a day is 1440 therefore if you multiply it by 60 you get 86,400 seconds
6. Finally double click or drag down the fill handle to automatically convert the remaining time to seconds
