Searching the archives turned up a lot of msgs on this, but nothing I
found hits exactly what I need, and I wasn't able to get there from
what has been suggested before ....


I have 4 cells, call them 'start_date', 'start_time', 'stop date', and
'stop time', containing values as you would expect. Dates are
formatted dd-mon-yy, times are formatted '13:30'. In the next cell I
need to calculate elapsed time in hh.0, such that an elapsed time of 2
hours and 36 minutes shows as 2.6 --- typical time clock format.

I can't seem to hit on the right combination of calculations and cell
formatting. Have tried using the INT function with a number format, as
was suggested on some similar threads.