Use Excel to keep track of time.Q. One of my duties is to keep a log of employees' hours worked. I know Excel A full-featured spreadsheet for Windows and the Macintosh from Microsoft. It can link many spreadsheets for consolidation and provides a wide variety of business graphics and charts for creating presentation materials. has a time-function application, so I figured it would not only track the hours but even give me end-of-week totals. But try as I might, I can't get Excel to tote up each day's hours. Rather than providing an end-of-the-week sum, the total at the bottom of the column is displayed as a time--such as 4:03 p.m. I assume I'm doing something wrong but I can't figure out my error. Can you help? A. I know what you're doing wrong. It's a subtle misstep that has to do with the way you formatted the cells that contain the hours. For Excel to add the hours you must format in a special way. Here's how: Highlight the cells that will contain the hours and right-click to open the format menu. Then crick Crick , Francis Henry Compton 1916-2004. British biologist who with James D. Watson proposed a spiral model, the double helix, for the molecular structure of DNA. He shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for advances in the study of genetics. on Format Cells and Number. Now scroll To continuously move forward, backward or sideways through the text and images on screen or within a window. Scrolling implies continuous and smooth movement, a line, character or pixel at a time, as if the data were on a paper scroll being rolled behind the screen. See auto scroll. down to Time, then to Custom and select [h]:mm:ss. The h stands for hours, mm for minutes and ss for seconds. If an employee worked 1 hour and 50 minutes, enter it this way: 1:50:00. In the example at left, I use the conventional Sum formula to add the hours: =sum(B2:B4). Also, you can save yourself time by accessing Excel's time-sheet templates, which have all the necessary formulas built in. To access them, engage Help (press F1) or type templates in the Type a question for help box. STANLEY ZAROWIN, a former JofA senior editor, is now a contributing editor A contributing editor is a magazine job title that varies in responsibilities. Most often, a contributing editor is a freelancer who has proven ability and readership draw. to the magazine. His e-mail address See Internet address. e-mail address - electronic mail address is zarowin@mindspring.com. |
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