The other day, I was building a spreadsheet to calculate FTE (full time equivalent) for staff based on hours worked on various days in a fortnight. While building the spreadsheet, I came across an interesting problem. Rounding Time to nearest minute. We can’t use ROUND() or MROUND() to round time as these formulas aren’t designed to work with time values. Although time values are technically decimal, rounding time to nearest minute (or quarter hour etc.) can be tricky when usual round formulas. Let me share a few formulas to round time to nearest point.
Let’s say you have a time value (either user input or calculated) in cell A1.
Use below formulas to round time in A1.
Nearest second: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MINUTE(A1), SECOND(A1)).
- SECOND formula rounds up any fractions and returns full seconds.
Nearest 15 seconds: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MINUTE(A1), MROUND(SECOND(A1),15))
- Use MROUND() to round up seconds values to nearest multiple of 15 (or whatever else)
Nearest Minute: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MINUTE(A1)+(SECOND(A1)>30),0)
- The seconds value will always be zero. We just look at fractional minutes portion to see if they are more then 30 to round up to next minute. The trick is to add up Boolean check (SECOND(A1)>30) to minutes value.
Nearest 15 minutes: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MROUND(MINUTE(A1)+SECOND(A1)/60,15),0)
- This one uses MROUND to round total mins (including fraction) to nearest multiple of 15.
Nearest 37th minute: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MROUND(MINUTE(A1)+SECOND(A1)/60,37),0)
- Same logic. Just to show you how to round to an arbitrary minute.
Nearest hour: =TIME(HOUR(A1) +((MINUTE(A1)+SECOND(A1)/60)>30),0,0)
- Check if total minutes is greater than 30 and add the result to hours.
Time for some home work
Let’s test your timing skills. Assuming A1 has date & time value (like 26-Jun-2017 7:21:32 AM), round it up to nearest working hour.
- The working hours are 9AM to 6PM on weekdays (Monday – Friday)
Post your answers in the comments section. Tick tock, tick tock… time is ticking, post your answers.
Time to polish your skills
Always having a hard time working with times in Excel? Its high time you took some time to learn about Excel time.
- Working with date & time values in Excel – a quick intro
- Convert fractional time to hours & minutes
- Highlighting over due items
- 42 tips for Excel time travelers – calculating past, present and future time values using formulas
- Sorting by birthday
- More date & time tips
17 Responses to “Custom Number Formats – Colors”
You are right, Chandoo. I was playing with the colour numbers last week and some of them don't appear different from each other. Others are totally different from yours.
@Duncan
Each version of Excel, post 2003, renders colors slightly differently
Different language versions may also have different default color palettes
Hello in french
excel 2010
colo1 = couleur1 = black
[couleur1]; [couleur2]; etc..
@Hui, thank you very much again for this great post.
However - under Excel 2007, Hungarian version your solution does not work with color names. I've tried both English and Hungarian names, but drops an error message "not valid formats"
Do you have any idea how to solve this issue?
thanks in advance
@Andras
Without a Hungarian version of Excel 2003 I don't think I can assist
Have you tried using the colour numbers? I couldn't get the names to work (despite using an english version of excel). but it did work with the numbers though. I left out the "u" and was easily able to produce burgundy using [color9]
Here a possible solution: find an English version of Excel, write there the formats using English names, then open the file in the Hungarian version and see the translation.
In Excel 2007 I can't get the colour names to work e.g Sea Green but the numbers do e.g color3 - colour3 does not work so I must bow to the country that has stolen my language (ha ha!)
Hey chandoo, nice Tip!
Wouldn't be easier just apply some conditional formatting for negative numbers and another for positive numbers? Or there's some cases that you can't do that?
Unfortunately the TEXT function doesn't color the cell as number formatting does.
Hi Hui,
Great post Sir, love the new way of formatting with color numbers.
I am using 2007, and it leads me to the last color number 56.
Thanks Hui.
[…] explains how to set up custom number formats with a wide array of […]
Thanks Hui - works a treat!
Thank you, very helpful.
Trying to figure out if it is possible to apply color only to a part of the cell?
E.g. I have a value formatted as Accounting with a currency symbol.
Those I find somewhat distracting though necessary. If I could make them less obtrusive by coloring them gray while the number would stay black, that would be great. Tried tinkering with the format string, but didn't get the desired result. Single color for complete cell value works, but coloring just part of it could not be achieved. Maybe somebody managed that?
Exactly what I was looking for - thank you!
colour in the Australian doesn't work - we have to go American and no problem.
I always thought is was 56 colours notice you have 57. Cool.
thanks
Analir Pisani
Customised Microsoft Office Training Specialist
Sydney - Australia
http://www.azsolutions.com.au
Thank You!