Raul is setting up an excel spreadsheet to track how many hours his employees work each day. for the first worker, he has inserted the formula "=(i3-h3)” into cell j3.

raul needs to see a number of hours but instead he sees a decimal. he knows the employee worked more than 0.35 hours that day. what should raul do to make j3 show a number of hours?

a. insert “*24” at the end of the formula

b. reformat j3 as a general number

c. insert “hours” after the equal sign in the formula

d. change the order of the cells referenced in the formula

The key to solve this number time format in Excel lies in understanding the simple seconds, hour and day calculations together with cell referencing. Cell referencing stands for the cell names where we will be performing our formula.

Explanation:

Numbers in Excel comes in various format. One of the headache from it is Excel often recognize times (x) as a decimal even when we are talking about time or hour. The key to solve this number time format in Excel lies in understanding the simple seconds, hour and day calculations together with cell referencing. Cell referencing stands for the cell names where we will be performing our formula.

The formula that we need to put in to cell J3 should have an idea like this: = (Clocked out - Clocked in) x 24  

You can just use a simple formula by applying subtraction operation using from your clocked out / time out to your clocked in / time in. The answer will be the difference of this two times then you should multiple it to 24 which stands for 24 hours in one day.  

Another thing, you must use the INT function to make sure that our answers in excel will be rounded off to the nearest integer. We definitely don't want any decimals in any of our cells.

Therefore the formula should look like this in cell J3:  = INT((I3-H3) *24).

Almost a similar idea can be applied if we want to solve for the MINUTES between two times. Instead of using 24, we must use 1440 instead. Now, why do we need to use 1440? 1440 stands for the total minutes that we have for a single day. (24 hours * 60 minutes = 1440 minutes)

Therefore the formula should look like this: = ((I3-H3)*1440).