In case you have time values in Excel, what you really have in the back end in Excel are decimal numbers that represent that time value (which are formatted to be shown as time in the cells).Īnd since these are numbers, you can easily subtract these.īelow I have a data set where I have the start time and the end time, and I want to calculate the difference between these two times. While the day part of the date would be represented by the whole number, the time part would be represented by the decimal.įor example, 44197.5 would represent 12:00 PM and 44197.25 would represent 09:00 AM Just like dates, even time values are stored as numbers in Excel. You can read more about subtracting dates in Excel here Subtract Time in Excel The basic Excel subtraction formula is as simple as this: number1-number2 For example, to subtract 10 from 100, write the below equation and get 90 as the result: 100-10 To enter the formula in your worksheet, do the following steps: In a cell where you want the result to appear, type the equality sign ( ). So you won’t be able to subtract dates with such a format For example, if you use, Excel won’t recognize it as a date and consider it a text string. Note: This formula would only work when you using a date that Excel recognizes as a valid date format. But this will be a tedious process especially when the range. You can easily adjust this and get the values in numbers by going to the Home tab, and select General in the number format drop-down. While you can use the minus sign and specify all the cells one by one so subtract multiple cells.

This sometimes happens when Excel tries to be helpful and pick up the format from the adjacent column. There is a possibility that Excel will give you the result in the date format instead of a number as shown above.

Excel subtract formula multiple cells