Rounding time to nearest minute or quarter hour etc. [formulas]

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The other day, I was building a spreadsheet to calculate FTE (full time equivalent) for staff based on hours worked on various days in a fortnight. While building the spreadsheet, I came across an interesting problem. Rounding Time to nearest minute.  We can’t use ROUND() or MROUND() to round time as these formulas aren’t designed to work with time values. Although time values are technically decimal, rounding time to nearest minute (or quarter hour etc.) can be tricky when usual round formulas. Let me share a few formulas to round time to nearest point.

round-time-in-excel

Let’s say you have a time value (either user input or calculated) in cell A1.

Use below formulas to round time in A1.

Nearest second: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MINUTE(A1), SECOND(A1)).

  • SECOND formula rounds up any fractions and returns full seconds.

Nearest 15 seconds: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MINUTE(A1), MROUND(SECOND(A1),15))

  • Use MROUND() to round up seconds values to nearest multiple of 15 (or whatever else)

Nearest Minute: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MINUTE(A1)+(SECOND(A1)>30),0)

  • The seconds value will always be zero. We just look at fractional minutes portion to see if they are more then 30 to round up to next minute. The trick is to add up Boolean check (SECOND(A1)>30) to minutes value.

Nearest 15 minutes: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MROUND(MINUTE(A1)+SECOND(A1)/60,15),0)

  • This one uses MROUND to round total mins (including fraction) to nearest multiple of 15.

Nearest 37th minute: =TIME(HOUR(A1), MROUND(MINUTE(A1)+SECOND(A1)/60,37),0)

  • Same logic. Just to show you how to round to an arbitrary minute.

Nearest hour: =TIME(HOUR(A1) +((MINUTE(A1)+SECOND(A1)/60)>30),0,0)

  • Check if total minutes is greater than 30 and add the result to hours.

Time for some home work

Let’s test your timing skills. Assuming A1 has date & time value (like 26-Jun-2017 7:21:32 AM), round it up to nearest working hour.

  • The working hours are 9AM to 6PM on weekdays (Monday – Friday)

Post your answers in the comments section. Tick tock, tick tock… time is ticking, post your answers.

Time to polish your skills

Always having a hard time working with times in Excel? Its high time you took some time to learn about Excel time.