Changing Time Formats in Microsoft Excel

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Gary for Expert Village; now what about times? Here we’ve entered in a few different formats of times. We have 14:25 or we can actually enter in the, we can actually enter it in as 2:25, also the seconds with a PM, or we can actually put in just the 2:25 without the twenty-four hour conversion and if we go ahead and we click on our column, and we go ahead and click on format cells. We see again we have, just like we had with “date”, we have an option on the left for “time”, and we have a few different options on how to show the time. So if we change it to let’s say the, the full time with the seconds we see our time has changed into that format. If we go ahead and we select the, let’s say just the, without the seconds, just the hour and the minutes and we click ok, here we eliminated the seconds and now we are back to our, our regular hours and minutes with the PM and AM time. So these are the different options of how to show the time. Just a quick tip, if you want to enter in quickly the current date or the current time you would click on a cell and for the current date you would hit “control” and “semicolon” and immediately the date appears and if you wanted to put the right time in you would click on “control” and “colon” which would have the, hit the “shift” key and “colon” and here you will have the entry of the time. Here we see it’s actually showing the date and the time, and over here, we have the, we have the time, just the time. So this is a quick way just to, if you want to just quickly enter it into the, into a cell it’s either “control, semicolon” for the date or “control, colon” for the time. The nice thing about dates and times in Excel is that the Excel program converts dates and times to serial numbers so that you can actually perform calculations on these values as you would with any number. For example you could determine, if you wanted to, you could determine the number of days that have passed between two dates. You would just subtract date one from date two and you would, you would see the number of days in between so it treats the dates and the times. The same thing is true for times, subtracting different hours and minutes from another entry of hours and minutes, and you can see how much time is in between so the nice thing is that Excel treats them as regular digits that can be used for calculations which is also sometimes helpful in the spreadsheet. "