In case you have time values in Excel, what you really have in the back end in Excel are decimal numbers that represent that time value (which are formatted to be shown as time in the cells).Īnd since these are numbers, you can easily subtract these.īelow I have a data set where I have the start time and the end time, and I want to calculate the difference between these two times. While the day part of the date would be represented by the whole number, the time part would be represented by the decimal.įor example, 44197.5 would represent 12:00 PM and 44197.25 would represent 09:00 AM

Just like dates, even time values are stored as numbers in Excel. You can read more about subtracting dates in Excel here Subtract Time in Excel So you won’t be able to subtract dates with such a format For example, if you use, Excel won’t recognize it as a date and consider it a text string. Note: This formula would only work when you using a date that Excel recognizes as a valid date format. The formula below subtracts the value in cell A2 and the value in cell A3 from the value in cell A1.

Simply use the minus sign (-) as the subtraction operator. You can easily adjust this and get the values in numbers by going to the Home tab, and select General in the number format drop-down. For example, the formula below subtracts numbers in a cell. You can subtract cells in Excel simply by putting a minus sign (-) between the cells you want to subtract in the formula bar. This sometimes happens when Excel tries to be helpful and pick up the format from the adjacent column. There is a possibility that Excel will give you the result in the date format instead of a number as shown above.

Excel formulas for subtracting