or Excel Charting Hacks # 2
Roughly 35-40% of my working time in office is spent with powerpoint. As one of my mentors said, powerpoint gives neither the power nor the point. Apart from writing truck loads of bullet points and using auto shapes, I also work alot with numbers and charts. Obviously I resort to excel for drawing the same, but over the last few months I have observed that, everytime I create a chart, I follow these steps mechanically,
- Adjust the font to Verdana or something
- Remove the chart background
- Format gridlines to something really dull and dotted
- Remove the outline border for individual bars / pies etc.
- Enable data labels, format them
- Change colors of the bars / pies to something pleasent to the eye
It take roughly 2-3 mins for each chart to do this, often it takes more time when I am working with lots of numbers. Now, that is a lot of time to waste on daily basis. So I have developed few “user-defined charts”. Whenever I create a chart I apply one of these templates and then touch it up based on the presentation template or need of the hour. This is saving me a quite a lot of time and might as well do it for you.
User Defined Charts in Excel:
UDCs is a very useful hidden feature in excel that saves a lot of time, easy to know and use and still lacks significant awareness. I think, excel is full of such things.
How to define “User Defined Chart”:
Once you have a chart formated to your need, you can add it user-defined charts list so that you can use it next time with a different set of data. To do that;
- Select the chart which you want to add to “user defined” list
- Click on menu options Chart->chart-type
- Go to Custom tab, select “user-defined” radio. Click on the add button and specify a title and description. (see the screenshots aside. Focus on the Red circles)
Now, for your use I have included all the 13 chart templates I have created in an excel. Download excel charting hacks # 2 and say NO to default charts forever. Remember, you have to add my charts to your computer by manually clicking on the Add button for every chart. Thats one time process though.
[Read more excel charting hacks]
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....
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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 !