The current data type of "Time", when available, stores a time of day. On several occasions I have needed a time data type that represents an amount of time. Generally people read and record amounts of time as a measure of the individual units of time rather than in decimal fractions of an hour. For Example 1:32:15 would indicate 1 hour 32 minutes and 15 seconds. Would be useful in spreadsheets and database columns.-- blahginger, Mar 31 2004 Not sure if it exists or not but sounds reasonable.-- simonj, Mar 31 2004 I could use that, too. I would use the term "time interval."
For instance, I want to know how long until Christmas, so opened Excel and I typed "December 25, 2004" in Cell A1, and "March 31, 2004" in Cell B1. Then I typed " =A1-B1" in Cell C1, and the answer was "September 25, 1900."-- AO, Mar 31 2004 This is very specific to some user programming environment you're using. It seems to me that this isn't something that nobody has ever thought of - more something that a particular programmer for a particular company couldn't be bothered with at the time, or didn't feel worth having to explain.-- jutta, Mar 31 2004 I thought spreadsheets did something like this already. I recall old 1-2-3 used to have @functions for displaying hours and minutes and stuff.-- waugsqueke, Mar 31 2004 I often have to write complicated formulas (like =CONCATENATE(INT(C7/24)*24,":", ....) )to get this display, a format that does it would be helpful.-- kbecker, Mar 31 2004 Bl**dy Microsoft won't let you do it easily in Excel, I had to do some complicated stuff just to make a timesheet work for recording daily and monthly hours worked. If there is a simple format for this in there somewhere, could someone tell me?-- unclepete, Apr 01 2004 Excel does this already. Format the destination cell as: Category:Time, Type:37:30:55. The "13:30:55" is just an example given in the form. Really, it is [hh]:mm:ss, elapsed time.
[AO], try formatting cell C1 as just "Number".
[unclepete] I have done some consulting on Excel. My rates are quite reasonable...-- xrayTed, Apr 01 2004 I managed to do it eventually [xTed], just wanted an easy way to allow time-of-day inputs to add and subtract elapsed hours and minutes. It seemed that you could do almost anything EXCEPT that. (Plus I'd much rather sit here swearing and hitting the damn computer with a stick than pay for help!)-- unclepete, Apr 01 2004 random, halfbakery