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Processing Time Intervals
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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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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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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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. |
#6
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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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incremental time, time of day |
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