We recently went on a road trip around parts of New Zealand’s north island. We have been to Taupo, Rotorua, East Cape and Napier. It took us 2 weeks, we drove more than 2,000 km and spent almost NZ $3,000 on the trip. Of course, being a data nerd, I made a plan of the trip in Excel and that helped us budget for this.
After getting back to home, I thought it would be fun to polish the planner workbook and share it with you all so you too can plan a fabulous road trip. So here we go.
Road trip budget & planner template
Click here to download the template.
How is it setup?
Simple. Any road trip style holiday has 4 main categories of expenses – Accommodation, Driving, Activities and Food. You can add one more category called “Other” to set budget for any miscellaneous expenses.
The template starts with budget for each of these 5 categories. Just specify the budget for each (except for food, which you can type in per day budget in the settings area.
Once you have the budgets in, also specify settings for calculating fuel expenses. Specify the MPG (or KMPL) and gas cost per gallon (or liter) and the template will calculate driving costs based on the number of miles (or KM) you plan to drive each day.
The last step is to enter daily details. For each day of your trip enter below details in the trip table:
- Date
- Where you plan to stay and how much it costs
- How much you plan to drive
- What activities you plan to take up and how much they cost
- Your actual food expenses (ie groceries, eating out, take away etc.)
- Any other expenses as you incur
The summary area shows how much of your budget is used up and a cute little thermometer chart for each category.
That is all. Enjoy your road trip.
Bonus: a simple way to extend the template
If you spend all the money on one credit (or debit) card, you can import the statement in to a new tab, categorize the expenses along the lines of Stay, Drive, Activities, Food or Other and then use SUMIFS to calculate actual values.
Hui’s Excel Hack
My apologies to Chandoo, but I have hacked his post
I have been using Excel 2016 and Office 365 for a while and as a Mining Engineer love to pay with Location data
I Rearranged Chandoo’s data and added a Single Activity Field instead of having multiple activity fields
I dragged the whole new table into Power Map and Voila
You can see how simple this is looking at the modified file here Dowload Modified File
Exporting the animation is a feature of Power Map, Yes I should have zoomed in on the heat map further
I hope Chandoo doesn’t remove my keys…
Like tracking things? Check out these templates
If you enjoy tracking and planning, check out these awesome templates too.
- 7 Personal finance trackers
- Grow your money mustache with this template
- Monthly planner template
- To do list template with priorities
How do you plan / track holidays?
For smaller / weekend getways, we don’t plan. We just get out and enjoy. But if we are going on a holiday / trip for more than a week, I like to plan things.
What about you? Do you plan / track your holidays? How do you do this? Please share your tips in the comments section.
13 Responses to “Convert fractional Excel time to hours & minutes [Quick tip]”
Hi Purna..
Again a great tip.. Its a great way to convert Fractional Time..
By the way.. Excel has two great and rarely used formula..
=DOLLARFR(7.8,60) and =DOLLARDE(7.48,60)
basically US Account person uses those to convert some currency denomination.. and we can use it to convert Year(i.e 3.11 Year = 3 year 11 month) and Week(6.5 week = 6 week 5 days), in the same manner...
This doesn't work for me. When applying the custom format of [h]:mm to 7.8 I get 187:12
Any ideas why?
@Jason
7.8 in Excel talk means 7.8 days
=7.8*24
=187.2 Hrs
=187 Hrs 12 Mins
If you follow Chandoo's instructions you will see that he divides the 7.8 by 24 to get it to a fraction of a day
Simple, assuming the fractional time is in cell A1,
Use below steps to convert it to hours & minutes:
1. In the target cell, write =A1/24
2. Select the target cell and press CTRL+1 to format it (you can also right click and select format cells)
3. Select Custom from “Number” tab and enter the code [h]:mm
4. Done!
Hi, sorry to point this out but Column C Header is misspelt 'Hours Palyed'
good one
So how do I go the other way and get hours and minutes to fractional time?
If you have 7.5 in cell A1,
- Use int(A1) to get the hours.
- Use mod(A1,1)*60 to get minutes.
If you have 7:30 (formatted as time) in A1
- Use hours(a1) to get hours
- Use minutes(a1) to get minutes.
I had the same issue. You can solve it by changing the format as described above:
Right click cell > Format Cells > (In Number tab) > Custom > Then enter the code [h]:mm
([hh]:mm and [hhh]:mm are nice too if you want to show leading zeros)
Thanks guys, these are the tips I'm looking for.
...dividing the number of minutes elapsed by the percent change is my task - "int" is the key this time
It doesnt work for greater than 24 hours
It returns 1:30 for 25.5 hours. It should have returned 25:30
Ideally I would right function as
=QUOTIENT(A1,1)&":"&MOD(A1,1)*60
Sorry, replied to wrong comment....
----
I had the same issue. You can solve it by changing the format as described above:
Right click cell > Format Cells > (In Number tab) > Custom > Then enter the code [h]:mm
([hh]:mm and [hhh]:mm are nice too if you want to show leading zeros)
Clever use of MOD here to extract the decimal part of a number. Divide a number containing a decimal by 1 and return the remainder. Humm. Very clever.
Thanks very much, extremely useful !