In the 17th session of Chandoo.org podcast, lets leave Excel aside and talk about other MS Office apps.
Thats right. We will be learning 10 tips on how to use Word, Power Point, Outlook etc. Ready?

What is in this session?
A while ago, I got an email from Paul Woods. Paul is an Office 365 MVP, fellow blogger, father of twins and intrepreneur. Since we have several coincidences in our lives (both of us are MVPs since 2009, dads to twins, bloggers & started businesses), I wanted to know more about him. I invited him to a podcast interview so that he can tell us his story and teach us how to use MS Office better.
In this podcast, you will learn,
- About Paul
- Ten tips for MS Office
- 1. Use Excel to communicate instead of just calculations
- 2. Paste Special
- 3. Double click trick!
- 4. Inserting screenshots
- 5. Turning off notifications
- 6. Reply with a meeting
- Bonus tip: Type plain English notation of dates in meeting requests
- 7. Outline view in Word
- 8. Styles
- 9. Presenting slides online
- 10. Use One Note
- Conclusions
Go ahead and listen to the show
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Links & Resources mentioned in this session:
Paul Woods websites
Many thanks to Paul Woods for sharing beautiful tips with all of us in this podcast. Please visit his websites to know more about his work & life.
Follow up tricks
- Format Painter (and 7 more formatting tips)
- Format Painter for charts
- Double click tricks in Excel
- Using Paste Special in Excel
Transcript of this session:
Download this podcast transcript [PDF].
What are your favorite non-Excel office tips?
I like the tips about outline view & presenting online from this podcast. Apart from these 10, I also like alignment tools, slide transitions in Power Point, mail merge in Word.
What about you? What are your favorite non-Excel Office tips? Please share using comments.















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 !