Infopackets Reader Katia E. writes:

" Hi Dennis!

I need your help in solving a little dilemma. I created a simple Excel spreadsheet to calculate the employee work hours from a time card. The problem is that I just cannot find a formula that will add the total hours worked everyday, in order to get a total of hours worked for the week.

For example, the time card contains the following information: SAT --, SUN --, MON 8:31am, TUE 8:33am, WED 8:43am, THU 8:12am, FRI 9:00am. Any help you can give me to leave this frustration behind is greatly appreciated! "

My response:

This is actually a very common 'computer science' problem, and can be easily solved by standardizing the base unit of time. One approach you can use is to convert hours into minutes, add up the total minutes, convert the total back into hours, and then multiply the hours by the hourly wage.

For example:

32 hours and 15 minutes worked for the week = (32 hours x 60 minutes) + 15 minutes = 1935 minutes total

To convert the total minutes into hours: = (1935 minutes / 60) = 32.25 total hours worked

To figure out the pay check (based on an hourly wage): = 32.25 hours x Rate of Pay = your check