Excel Formula: Calculate Hours Minutes Seconds between Two Times
Normally in Excel, you can use the simple formula EndTime-StartTime,to calculate the difference between two times. But sometimes, you may want to calculate the time difference in one time unit ignoring others. For instance, 12:30:11 and 18:42:12, get the hour difference is 6, minute difference is 12, second difference is 1. Here in this tutorial, it introduces some formulas to quickly present the time difference result as single time unit.
If you want to follow along with this tutorial, please download the example spreadsheet.
Generic formula:
Difference in hours, ignoring minutes and seconds:
| HOUR(end_time-start_time) |
Difference in minutes, ignoring hours and seconds:
| MINUTE(end_time-start_time) |
Difference in seconds, ignoring hours and minutes:
| SECOND(end_time-start_time); |
Arguments
| Start_datetime: the starting time in the time range. |
| End_datetime: the ending time in the time range. |
Error
1. If the start time is greater than the end time, the formula will return the error value #VALUE!.
2. If start time or end time is over 24 hours, the formula will return the error value #VALUE!.
How this formula work
Supposing in cell B3 and C3 are the start time and end time, to calculate the hours, minutes and seconds separately, please use the formula as these:
Difference in hours, ignoring minutes and seconds:
| =HOUR(C3-B3) |
Difference in minutes, ignoring hours and seconds:
| =MINUTE(C3-B3) |
Difference in seconds, ignoring hours and minutes:s
| =SECOND(C3-B3)Press Enter key to get the result. |
Press Enter key to get the result.
Explanation
Hour function: Returns the hour as a number between 0 and 23 from a Time.
Minute function:Extracts the minute from a time value and displays as number from 0 to 59.
Second function: Returns the seconds from a time value and displays as number from 0 to 59.
Relative Formulas
- Calculate difference between two dates
Here in this tutorial, it introduces the formulas on calculating difference between two dates in years, months, weeks, and days. - Calculate Calculate Days Hours Minutes Seconds Between Two Dates
Sometimes, we may want to get the days, hours, minutes, and seconds between two datetimes, this tutorial introduces the formula to solve this job. - Calculate Days Remaining Between Two Dates
Here, this tutorial provides a formula to quickly calculate the left days between two dates. - Calculate Network Time With Break In A Timesheet
It provides the formula which uses the MOD function to calculate the network time with breaks in Excel.
Relative Functions
- Excel IF Function
Test for specified conditions, then returns the corresponding values - Excel VALUE Function
Convert text to number. - Excel MONTH Function
The MONTH is used to get the month as integer number (1 to 12) from date. - Excel DAY Function
DAY function gets the day as a number (1 to 31) from a date - Excel YEAR Function
The YEAR function returns the year based on the given date in a 4-digit serial number format.
The Best Office Productivity Tools
Kutools for Excel - Helps You To Stand Out From Crowd
Kutools for Excel Boasts Over 300 Features, Ensuring That What You Need is Just A Click Away...
Office Tab - Enable Tabbed Reading and Editing in Microsoft Office (include Excel)
- One second to switch between dozens of open documents!
- Reduce hundreds of mouse clicks for you every day, say goodbye to mouse hand.
- Increases your productivity by 50% when viewing and editing multiple documents.
- Brings Efficient Tabs to Office (include Excel), Just Like Chrome, Edge and Firefox.
