How to work with times

Let’s take a look.

Here we have a set of random times in column B.

Now let’s extract the components of each time using Excel’sHOUR,MINUTE, andSECONDfunctions.

I’ll extract the hour value using a function called HOUR.

HOUR takes just one argument: a time in serial number format.

When I give it the value in column B, it returns just the hour from the time.

In this case, the number 12.

To get minutes, use theMINUTE function.

Like theHOUR function, MINUTE requires only a valid time.

Finally, theSECOND functionwill return just the seconds for a time.

All of these functions will calculate a new result when a time value changes.

Now let’s recombine these date components into a time again.

For that, we need to use theTIME function.

TIME takes hours, minutes, and seconds as separate arguments and returns a valid time.

For example, I can add 15 minutes to the first time.

The result is 12:15 PM.

The same is true with seconds.

If I add 600 seconds to a time, you could see that 10 minutes get added.

If I subtract 600 seconds, 10 minutes are removed.

That’s because we aren’t preserving the date anywhere in our calculations.