Excel spreadsheets are useful tools to work with many kinds of data. This data can take a variety of forms, like a time. Sometimes, it’s useful to extract the minute from a given time. Fortunately, Excel offers an easy way to do exactly that. Let’s learn how to use MINUTE in Microsoft Excel.
How to Use MINUTE in Excel
Let’s imagine that you have a list of times in an Excel spreadsheet. For example, cells C2, C3, and C4 contain the times 9:53 AM, 10:07 PM and 1:40 PM. Of course, these times contain both hours and minutes. You may want to see only the minutes, listed in separate cells as 53, 7, and 40.
Of course, you could input this data manually simply by typing the numbers above. But imagine if you had a list of 500 times. Working manually would take far too long! This is where Excel’s MINUTE function comes in, to help you calculate in minutes.
To use MINUTE, click into an empty cell. You can use any cell in your spreadsheet, but we’ll choose D2 to place the minute value immediately beside the full time.
Then, type an = sign. This tells Excel that you’re typing a formula into the selected cell. Continue by inserting the MINUTE function:
=MINUTE(
Click into the cell containing the first time value, C2, type ), and your formula will be complete:
=MINUTE(C2)
Hit Enter on your keyboard, and cell D2 will display the value 53.
From here, you can click and drag the lower right corner of cell D2 downward into cells D3 and D4. This will copy your MINUTE function to extract the minute value from the other two cells.
As you can see, MINUTE in Excel is a fast and simple way to work with time values. It saves you precious time if you want to extract minutes from longer times.