If you don’t want your head to hurt by doing it that way, there’s a much easier way to add and subtract time in Excel.

Adding Time in Excel

Adding time is just as easy as adding any other number in Excel using the SUM function. Simply populate your list with the times formatted as hours:minutes like this 4:25 for four hours and 25 minutes.

Next, to add the time simply click the ∑ AutoSum button in the Editing Group on the Home tab while in the cell where you want the total to be. Make sure the correct cells are included in the AutoSum, and hit Enter. In the screenshot below, I wanted the total in cell B5, so I clicked that cell then clicked AutoSum. After checking that it correctly added cells B2:B4 I hit Enter, which gave me my total of 15 hours and 48 minutes.

Now, what happens if we are adding times that exceed 24 hours? We end up with a messy result if we don’t do a bit of formatting first.

In the same example as the screenshot above, if I make Job 1 take 14:25 instead of 4:25, the AutoSum changes to 1:48. Clearly that is not correct.

In order to get it to display the correct total (25:48), we need to format the total time. To do this, right click the total cell and select Format Cells.

In the Category box to the left, select “Custom”. Then in the Type box to the right, enter [h]:mm.

By using the left and right square brackets around the letter “h”, you are telling Excel that it can exceed 24 hours in the display.

The previous examples showed how to get the aggregate amount of time. But what if you wanted to add an amount of time to a given time of day?

Say we were trying to figure out what time of day it would be 8 hours after say 9 AM. With the TIME function, we can add any number of hours, minutes, and seconds to a given time to get the time it would be after that length of time.

In this case we would have 9AM in one cell and add TIME(8,0,0) to it. The numbers in the parenthesis are 8 for the number of hours we want to add, the first 0 for the number of minutes, and the last 0 for the number of seconds.

You can change the numbers in the TIME portion of the formula to get any number of hours, minutes, or seconds to add to another time this way.

Read on to learn about subtracting time in Excel.

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With that example, it isn’t easy to just look at the data and know that the first 10 rows are January’s transactions, the next 12 are February’s, etc. Analyzing the data could be even harder if all the transactions are out of order. However it isn’t terribly difficult to get a sum of values in a month.

Sum Values In A Month

Let’s look at a simple example with two transactions per month for January, February, and March.

We are given the date of the transaction and the transaction amount but also want to find out the monthly totals. Now keep in mind that this is a simple example, but imagine if there were instead hundreds of transactions that need to be added up, the task could be much more difficult.

We will be using two formulas to get our answer: SUMPRODUCT and MONTH.

MONTH will produce a number between 1 (January) – 12 (December) given a particular date. For example, =MONTH(1/15/2014) will give a result of 1, because this date is in January.

SUMPRODUCT returns the sum of the products of a given range.

When we combine the two, we can use them to sum values in a month.

First set up your spreadsheet like in the screenshot above. Enter dates in A2:A7, dollar amounts in B2:B7, the numbers 1, 2, and 3 (for months January through March) in cells D2, D3, and D4 respectively. Finally, enter the following formula in cell E2:

=SUMPRODUCT((MONTH($A$2:$A$7)=D2)*($B$2:$B$7))

Then copy the formula down to E3 and E4.

Your spreadsheet should now have monthly totals for January, February, and March.

Obviously, in your actual worksheet you will replace the cell references with the applicable cells that you are working with. If you have a set of data that may encompass a variable number of rows (i.e. past row 7 in our example), you can replace $A$2:$A$7 and $B$2:$B$7 with A:A and B:B, which will use the entire column. However, please note that any errant text like a header row will cause an error in the formula.

You can also sum values in a year by replacing MONTH in the formula with YEAR, and replacing the numbers 1-3 in cells D2:D4 with years such as 2014, 2015, 2016, etc.

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Let’s say you run a restaurant, and you want to see what menu items sell the best on any given day of the week. Looking at just one week’s worth of data doesn’t give you a good picture since you could have had a large party come in on a usually slow day, and throw off your statistics.

Instead, create a spreadsheet with a separate tab for each week you want to track, plus a total tab.

Next, click the Week 1 tab, hold down the Shift key and click the Total tab then release the Shift key. This selects all the tabs in your workbook, and allows you to type information into one sheet and have it show up in all the worksheets in your file.

On the Week 1 tab, click in cell A1 and enter Menu Item, then enter Monday through Sunday in cells B1 through H1. In cells A2 through A7, enter some menu items. I’m using Fish, Steak, Pork, Pasta, Alcohol, and Total. You can enter whatever you want here and go down as far as you need to.

If you want to apply any formatting to all the cells or add total formulas, go ahead and do that now while all the worksheets are still selected.

Using Excel 3D Sum Formula

Now that all the consistent formatting has been done, click on any of the other worksheets in your workbook in order to deselect all the others.

Enter in some sales data for each of the weeks.

Now that all the weeks are populated, you can start using the 3D sum formula in order to get the Total tab populated.

To do this, click on the Total tab, and select cell B2. Enter the following equation:

=SUM(Week1:Week6!B2)

This formula now adds up everything in cell B2 between Week 1 and Week 6. You can copy and paste that formula into the remaining cells to get the totals for all the other menu items and days.

More Than Just 3D Sum Formula?

Let’s say you wanted to something else with the data in this workbook. Maybe you didn’t want to add the data to get a total, but maybe you wanted to get an average, or find the minimum (or maximum) amount for each menu item on a given day.

You can use any of the following functions in a 3D formula:

• SUM
• AVERAGE
• AVERAGEA
• COUNT
• COUNTA
• MAX
• MAXA
• MIN
• MINA
• PRODUCT
• STDEV
• STDEVA
• STDEVP
• STDEVPA
• VAR
• VARA
• VARP
• VARPA

To use any of these functions in a 3D formula, click the cell you want to enter it in, and type

=[Name of Function](

Click the tab of the first worksheet in your reference (in the previous example, Week 1).

Hold down the Shift key, and click the last worksheet in the reference (in the previous example, Week 6).

Click the cell or range of cells to be referenced. Complete the formula with any additional arguments that are required, and then press Enter.

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