# Microsoft Office Application Help - Excel Help forum > Excel Formulas & Functions >  >  How to convert date/time to seconds

## christopher.marin@gmail.com

I would appreciate any help from an Excel guru out there that can help
me automatically convert a cell with a day:hours:minutes:seconds format
to seconds.  So for example, 0:00:04:44 should be converted to 284.

Any ideas?  Thanks in advance.

----------


## Trevor Shuttleworth

You don't actually express time as days, hours, minutes and seconds the way
you have shown it.  It is only hours, minutes and second

Assuming the time is in cell A1 *and* has zero days which can be ignored:

=RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-FIND(":",A1))*24*60*60    format as General

If you do have data in the format shown with days as the first element, you
could use:

=LEFT(A1,FIND(":",A1)-1)*24*60*60+RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-FIND(":",A1))*24*60*60

or

=(LEFT(A1,FIND(":",A1)-1)+RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-FIND(":",A1)))*24*60*60

Regards

Trevor


<christopher.marin@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1155943429.175503.216770@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>I would appreciate any help from an Excel guru out there that can help
> me automatically convert a cell with a day:hours:minutes:seconds format
> to seconds.  So for example, 0:00:04:44 should be converted to 284.
>
> Any ideas?  Thanks in advance.
>

----------


## Pete_UK

Times are stored internally by Excel as fractions of a 24-hour day, so
that 12:00:00 would be stored as 0.5 and 18:00:00 as 0.75.
Consequently, to convert a time to seconds, you must multiply by the
number of seconds in a day - it is easier to remember this as *24*60*60
rather than the actual number (86400).

Hope this helps.

Pete

christopher.marin@gmail.com wrote:
> I would appreciate any help from an Excel guru out there that can help
> me automatically convert a cell with a day:hours:minutes:seconds format
> to seconds.  So for example, 0:00:04:44 should be converted to 284.
>
> Any ideas?  Thanks in advance.

----------

