Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Converting Time to Minutes and Seconds

Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Converting Time to Minutes and Seconds

Here is how you can take an elapsed time originally represented in Hours, Minutes, and Seconds, and show it as just Minutes, or as Minutes and Seconds. For example, the picture shows the top 10 finishing times in column B for runners of the 2012 Boston Marathon. Those times are converted to just minutes in column C, and also converted to minutes and seconds in column D.



To represent times in minutes, notice in the next picture that I copied and pasted the list of times from column B into column C and again into column D. For column C to show the time in minutes:
• Select the range of interest — in this case, range C4:C13.
• From the keyboard, press Alt+O+E to show the Format Cells dialog box.
• In the Format Cells dialog box, on the Number tab, select Custom from the Categories list.
• In the Type field, enter [mm], then click OK.



To represent times in minutes and seconds:
• Select the range of interest — in this case, range D4:D13.
• From the keyboard, press Alt+O+E to show the Format Cells dialog box.
• In the Format Cells dialog box, on the Number tab, select Custom from the Categories list.
• In the Type field, enter [mm]:ss, then click OK.