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Old 16th December 2004 | 18:29
  #6 (permalink)  
Tinstaafl
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Joined: Dec 1998
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From: Escapee from Ultima Thule
Similarly to Engineer's formula:

=IF(B1<A1,B1+1,B1)-A1

where

A1 is departure time
B1 is arrival time.

Excel stores all times & dates in the format

aaaaaa.bbbbbb

where aaaaaa is whole days from an arbitrary starting point (~1 Jan 1900 or thereabouts), and bbbbb is a decimal fraction of a 24 hr 'day' that represents hours, mins & secs.

.5 would be 12 midday, .75 would be 1800 hrs, 1.25 would be the 1 day & 6 hrs after the arbitrary starting date etc.

Mathematically, when a subsequent time occurs after midnight from an initial time then it's really 'plus 1 day' as well as the hours/mins/secs. The problem comes from us using a short version of the date/time group that omits the day. *We* know that the arrival time is the next day and mentally allow for the extra 'day' by calculating time up to midnight + the time from midnight and summing the results, but the spreadsheet has no way of knowing - hence the 'plus 1' in the formula which presumes a smaller number means the arrival time must have crossed midnight.

You could choose to use a date/time group for all time entries then you wouldn't need the formula I gave. Bit of a pain for data entry though.

Last edited by Tinstaafl; 17th December 2004 at 22:20.
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