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Old 09-29-2011, 12:33 PM
pkrishna pkrishna is offline Processing Time Intervals Windows Vista Processing Time Intervals Office 2007
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Why does Excel treat time as nothing but the time of the day, starting from year 1900?



If I have a pencil that is ten inches long, it is not as if one end of the pencil is so many miles, so many furlongs, so many yards, so many feet, and so many inches from the center of the earth, and the other end of the pencil is that much plus ten inches from the center of the earth.

I have great difficulty in getting Excel to consider values of time intervals, such as time to complete a task, response time after a stimulus is noticed, time taken to walk a mile, or complete formatting of a document. Why should all these intervals of time have to be tied up with time of the day concept? Sure, I have devised various ways of working around this limitation of Excel, but every time I do, I am surprised as the lack of a time duration variable.

Why didn't the programmers at Microsoft ever consider designating a simple time variable, divorced from a time-of-the-day variable?
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Old 09-29-2011, 01:57 PM
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jujuwillis jujuwillis is offline Processing Time Intervals Windows XP Processing Time Intervals Office 2010 32bit
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Maybe this will explain it a little for you

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/datetime.htm
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Old 09-29-2011, 02:14 PM
pkrishna pkrishna is offline Processing Time Intervals Windows Vista Processing Time Intervals Office 2007
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Quite serendipitously, I came across Mr. Pearson's website yesterday, while looking up on this topic.

Several work-arounds are explained there. I have developed some on my own. However, the fact that Microsoft Excel is very poor at handling time intervals remains. A very serious feature deficiency in such a widely used software.

In explaining Time Intervals, Mr. Pearson says - "However, since Excel cannot handle negative times, you must use an =IF statement ... ". Why the hell not? A negative number for money, distance, weight, ... these are not exotic concepts in calculations. So is time. Why should 10 seconds be represented as 00:00:10 and -10 seconds result in apoplexy? (Just to make matters perfectly clear, my complaint is not with Pearson, but with Microsoft)
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Old 09-30-2011, 01:17 AM
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jujuwillis jujuwillis is offline Processing Time Intervals Windows XP Processing Time Intervals Office 2010 32bit
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Have you tried posting your query on www.excelforum.com. The knowledge of the guys and girls on that sight is phenomenal on functions, formulas and formats etc.
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Old 09-30-2011, 05:18 AM
pkrishna pkrishna is offline Processing Time Intervals Windows Vista Processing Time Intervals Office 2007
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Thanks, I will do that.

But the question remains why the hell doesn't Microsoft itself take care of this glaring lacuna in an otherwise great software offering. They keep adding more and more functionality, but not this (in my opinion) important aspect of incremental time processing.

Fortunately there are any number of Excel Gurus who fill up the gap.
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Old 09-30-2011, 06:24 AM
OTPM OTPM is offline Processing Time Intervals Windows 7 32bit Processing Time Intervals Office 2010 32bit
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Hi
Nothing in this life is ever perfect or anywhere near it. The challenge is finding a solution thats fits your needs. This is why this forum exists, thankfully.
Tony(OTPM)
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