On Excel, what is the best way to track playing time?

Question

I do the stats for my soccer team. One of the categories I keep is playing time. How can I keep the playing time to have a total on the bottem most effiecently? Ex. Cell C3 is playing time for game one. 4 minutes, 58 seconds (4:58). Cell C4 is playing time for game two. 62 minutes, 4 seconds (62:04). Cell C18 is totals. It should be 67 minutes, 2 seconds (67:02). Instead (following the way Excel tells me to), either some crazy high number, or a decimal pops up.

Answer 1

First, for all the cells, select from menu: Format / Cells / Number / Custom / and choose "h:mm:ss"

Then enter each number with the following formula:

=TIME(HOURS,MINUTES,SECONDS)

For example, 67 minutes 2 seconds would be =time(0,67,2)

Then just sum the values and make sure the answer cell is also formatted the same as above.

Answer 2

I suggest you format the whole column with the time format 37:30:55. This will make everything consistent.

Then you need to carefully enter your times. If a player has 62 minutes and 4 seconds, enter it as 1:02:04, One hour, two minutes and 4 seconds.

then you need to enter zero for the hours on people with less than an hour. 4 minutes and 58 seconds will be 0:04:58.

The large number you got was because minutes entered on the first number came up as hours and seconds became minutes.

Just remember that you have to enter hours AND minutes AND seconds for all entries and you should have no problem.

Answer 3

The problem could be in the formatting of the time. You may want to go into format, cells, time...and choose the one that shows something like 37:30:22. That should work.