Calculate How Long A Task Will Take Using CONVERT Function - Formula Friday

Hello Excellers, time for some more Excel formula fun on a Friday. What could be better?. In today’s blog post let’s look at a really handy Excel formula to help us to easily calculate how long a task will take from start to finish. The whole task is made of a lot of mini-tasks that only take a few minutes each. In this example, the task is updating individual database records. We will be using the convert function in Excel to easily carry out this task.

First of all, I have already calculated that the length of time that the total task will take (in minutes). There is an estimation of 3 minutes to individually update each account record in the database. I have 3500 records to amend out of my database of 5000 records.

So, we can see the first bit is easy- calculating the total amount of minutes to update 3,500 records at 3 minutes per record.

Therefore, as a result of the calculations, we can see that the total task will take 10500 minutes, and what is that converted to hours?. Easy… this is where we can use the CONVERT Function!.

The Excel Convert Function.

The syntax of the formula is

=CONVERT(number,from_unit,to_unit)

Where

CONVERT this is the number we want to convert

from_unit the unit type you are converting from (in this case minutes)

to_unit the unit type to convert our number to (in this example it is hours)

Then, we can go ahead and build the formula and get this calculated with the first stage of the formula by hitting

=CONVERT(D7

Next, Excel will provide you with a drop down of all of the conversions it can conveniently carry out for us- nice. After that, we can then go ahead and complete the formula….

All we do no is close off the formula with a closing parenthesis and the job is done.

In conclusion, that full task is going to take 175 hours to do all of that work updating all of those records…….

Also, if you want to see the full list of useful unit conversions, you can see just a snippet of them in the screenshots above. For a full list-see the Microsoft website or just type in the function and scroll up and down to see how many are available. Really useful.