Hi, Folks, I wouldn't exactly say I'm NEW to Excel, as I used it in a past job, but I never quite got the hang of it. And with the changes to Office 2010, eeek!

I could use some help. I think the spreadsheet I need to create is pretty easy--I just can't quite picture it in my mind.

First, I am using 2010 at home but I see you can backsave to 2003 which is what I am using at my very new job. I want to make my (and everyone's life easier).

Here is the story: It's a library. We let patrons use six computers. They come in, and we hand them a physical number (like for a dressing room in a store) and on a chart, we sign them in, such as: "John: in at 10:30 a.m." Then when they depart, we take back their number and enter "out at 1:30 p.m." next to John's name.

Part of my new job is to do a statistical spreadsheet. This is already set up. There are two of them in the workbook: One is the number of patrons who use the computers per day; the other is how many hours per day they were used.

The previous employee was calculating the difference in time between, say, 10:30 and 1:30 and putting down "180 mins." then dividing by 60 and coming up with the average amount of hours on the computers in that way.

I also must count the number of patrons who used the computers. Which is easy to do by hand.
BUT...
I know Excel can calculate hours in this fashion. And I know that it can do averages. I just don't know how it might be best to set up this spreadsheet. I know I need subtotals (for each day) and I know I need to calculate the hours and do an average of hours for each day.

Can anyone help? Please! This will save me a ton of work.

Even if you just direct me to a couple of good tutorials, that's better than my Googling all over the place.

Thank you!

Hi,

Couple of questions first, then I'll see what I can put together for you.

Are the computers used in set time slots? i.e. From 10:00 to 12:30 (or any multiple of 15/30 minutes?) or could the slots be odd i.e. 10:24 to 12:37?

Are there just 6 patrons or a maximum of 6 at any given time?

If more than six, do they have "member numbers" or something else that would make them uniquely identifiable?