As you work in Excel, you may find yourself using time units. These include hours, minutes, seconds, and more. It’s often useful to display an hour value in a cell of its own. Fortunately, this is very easy to do in Excel. Let’s learn how to use HOUR in Microsoft Excel.
How to Use HOUR in Excel
Consider a list of times: 12:30, 9:33, 18:55, and so on. These are simple hour-and-minute times that you may encounter when you work with your data. It’s helpful to have the hour values listed separately, especially if you are performing calculations like finding the average hour, for example.
Of course, you could list the hours in their own cells by typing them in manually. But this is repetitive, and would take far too long if you had a lengthy list of times. This is where Excel’s HOUR function comes in.
To use HOUR, click into any empty cell in your workbook. It’s worth noting here that HOUR is based on 24-hour times. In other words, typing 6:35 will be treated as 6:35 AM. To type 6:35 PM, you should use 18:35.
In the cell you’ve selected, type an = sign, followed by HOUR(. Your formula reads:
=HOUR(
Then, click into the cell containing a time that you want to extract the hour from. Here, we’ll use cell A1. Lastly, close the parentheses, completing your formula as follows:
=HOUR(A1)
Hit Enter on your keyboard, and Excel displays the hour value: 12. From here, you can click and drag downward to copy your formula over the other times listed.
As you can see, Excel’s HOUR function makes it easy to extract the hour from a given time input. It’s easy to use, and fast to copy across large volumes of data. This streamlines your analysis tasks and makes your data more useful to you.
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