In this tutorial, you will learn how to subtract time in Google Sheets.
How to Subtract Time in Google Sheets
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We can subtract seconds, minutes, and hours from a given time value in Google Sheets. This can be helpful if you need to retrieve the time value a specific duration prior to some time value.
For example, suppose you want to know the time 8 hours before an event that starts at 2:00 PM. We can use a simple formula to go back a specific length of time before a particular time.In this guide, we’ll show you how to subtract time in Google Sheets.
How to Calculate the Time Delta in Google Sheets
Here’s our step-by-step guide on how to calculate the time delta in Google Sheets.
Step 1
First, select the cell where you want to return the result of subtracting time from our initial time value.
In our first example, we will be subtracting a certain number of minutes from some initial time to create a new time value.
Step 2
If we want to subtract minutes from a time value, we must convert the number of minutes into a fraction of a day. We can do this by dividing the number of minutes by 60 (the number of minutes in an hour) and divide once more by 24 ( the number of hours in a day).
Afterward, we can subtract this new value from the initial time.
In our example, we find out that 45 minutes prior to 5:00pm is 4:15 PM.
Step 3
We can now use the AutoFill tool to find the new time values for the remaining rows.
Step 4
If we want to subtract by hours, we shall divide our number of hours by 24.
In the example above, we find out that 8 hours before 11:30 PM is 3:30 PM.
Summary
This guide should be everything you need to learn to subtract time in Google Sheets.
You may make a copy of this example spreadsheet to test it out on your own.