Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 16, 2023)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365
Lorene has a column that contains various times of day. She needs to round the times to the nearest half hour and display them as, for example, 10 am and 10:30 am. (Lowercase, minutes shown for only the half hour, and lowercase am/pm indicator.) She wonders if this is something she can do with a custom format, or if she needs to use a formula.
The short answer is that you cannot get the desired result with just a custom format. Instead, you'll need to use three features of Excel: a formula, a custom format, and a conditional format, all working in conjunction with each other. How you can round times has been covered in a different ExcelTip, here:
https://tips.net/T11401
To boil it down succinctly, in Lorene's case you could round the time to the nearest half hour in the following manner:
=MROUND(A1,"0:30")
This assumes, of course, that the original time is in cell A1. You can then apply the following custom format to the result of the formula:
h:mm a/p\m
This will display the results of the formula as hours and minutes with an am/pm indicator. This, however, still isn't quite what Lorene is looking for, which is no minutes indicated if the minutes are ":00". The final step can be accomplished by adding a conditional format to the cell. Assuming that your formula is in cell B1, follow these steps:
Figure 1. The New Formatting Rule dialog box.
=MINUTE(B1)=0
h a/p\m
That's it; the cell will now display the formatted time value as Lorene desired.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (13913) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365.
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