Please help me in Excel. Which formula should I enter?

Question

I need a formula that automatically computes the TOTAL number of hours by entering the arrival and departure time.

For example.

Cell A1 (7am) arrival time

Cell B1 (3:15pm) departure time

Total number of hours: 8.25

Answer 1

Time Intervals

You can determine the number of hours and minutes between two times by subtracting the two times.  However, since Excel cannot handle negative times, you must use an =IF statement to adjust the time accordingly.  If your times were entered without a date (e.g, 22:30), the following statement will compute the interval between two times in A1 and B1 .

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

The "+1" in the formula causes Excel to treat B1  as if it were in the next day, so 02:30-22:00 will result in 4:30, four hours and thirty minutes, which is what we would expect.  To covert this to a decimal number, for example, 4.5, indicating how many hours, multiply the result by 24 and format the cell as General or Decimal, as in

=24*(IF(A1>B1,B1+1-A1,B1-A1))