Excel Tutorial – TIME

The TIME function in Microsoft Excel is a function that returns the current time. This can be useful if you want to track when a cell was updated or if you want to create a timestamp for your data.

To use the TIME function, follow these steps:

1. Open your Excel workbook and navigate to the cell where you want to apply the TIME function.
2. Type “=TIME(” into the cell, followed by the hour, minute, and second that you want to display. For example, if you want to display the time “3:45 PM”, you would type “=TIME(15, 45, 0)”.
3. Press the “Enter” key to complete the formula. The cell will now display the time that you specified.

Here’s an example of how you can use the TIME function in a formula:

=A1&” updated at “&TIME(HOUR(NOW()), MINUTE(NOW()), SECOND(NOW()))

In this example, the TIME function is used to insert the current time after the text in cell A1. The NOW function is used to get the current date and time, and the HOUR, MINUTE, and SECOND functions are used to extract the hour, minute, and second from the date and time. The “&” symbol is used to concatenate (join) the text and the time together.

You can also use the TIME function to update a cell automatically whenever the workbook is opened or when a cell is changed. To do this, you can use the following formula:

=IF(A1=””, TIME(HOUR(NOW()), MINUTE(NOW()), SECOND(NOW())), A1)

This formula checks if cell A1 is empty. If it is, the TIME function is used to insert the current time. If cell A1 is not empty, the original value is preserved.