Vergel’s Excel and Visual Basic Blog

Display Number of Seconds in ‘hh:mm:ss’ Format

March 19th, 2007

Let’s say you have an Excel file where you track some kind of process by the number of seconds it took to complete. Usually, it makes more sense to see the elapsed time in hh:mm:ss format. To do this, we divide the number in seconds by the number of seconds in a day (60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day = 86,400 seconds/day). We then give the cell a custom format of “hh:mm:ss”. The reason behind the division is that time values in Excel are stored as fractions of a day. So if we were given a value in minutes, we need to divide it only by the number of minutes in a day which is 1,440 minutes.

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