I have created a spreadsheet in Excel, tracking the time it took (minutes and
seconds) for each mile of a marathon (26 miles, 385 yards). I am trying to
find a way to get Excel to add the times, thus giving me the total time it
took to complete the race...I'm having difficulty finding the correct format
for the time for each mile, and how to get Excel to add it, giving me an
answer in hours and minutes. Is there any way to do this?

See Chip Pearson's site for doing arithmetic with dates and times.

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/datetime.htm#AddingTimes

Note the various links at the bottom of the page.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008 15:07:00 -0800, DES wrote:

I have created a spreadsheet in Excel, tracking the time it took (minutes and
seconds) for each mile of a marathon (26 miles, 385 yards). I am trying to
find a way to get Excel to add the times, thus giving me the total time it
took to complete the race...I'm having difficulty finding the correct format
for the time for each mile, and how to get Excel to add it, giving me an
answer in hours and minutes. Is there any way to do this?

DES,

If each of your times are in one cell formatted as "mm:ss", then add them
together as you would any other regular numbers.

=A1+A2+A3
or
=SUM(A1:A3)

all you need to do is format your cell differently. If you use "[h]:mm:ss"
as a custom format, that will show elapses hours, minutes, and seconds. If
you use "[m]:ss", that will display elapsed minutes and seconds.

If you have minutes and seconds in 2 different cells for each time, that
will be a little bit trickyer. Please write back with more information if
that is so.

HTH,

Conan





"DES" wrote in message
...
I have created a spreadsheet in Excel, tracking the time it took (minutes
and
seconds) for each mile of a marathon (26 miles, 385 yards). I am trying to
find a way to get Excel to add the times, thus giving me the total time it
took to complete the race...I'm having difficulty finding the correct
format
for the time for each mile, and how to get Excel to add it, giving me an
answer in hours and minutes. Is there any way to do this?