Adding Time

Google can do all kinds of tricks from the search bar. It can convert most any kind of measurement to any other, like acres to square meters or liters to acre-feet. It can handle almost any kind of mathematical expression, like 2+2 or 975.035^0.5 (the caret (^) means raise to a power, a power of 0.5 means take the square root). It even has a timer function. Simply enter timer.

But it won't add time. Looking back over the 8 videos about the Hitachi excavator I wondered how much time I had spent. Being a numbers kind of guy, I could add them up myself, but I thought I would give Google's Spreadsheet a try.  Type the times in a text editor, one time per line, copy them, open a spreadsheet and paste and the numbers should all appear in a column. That part worked fine for me. If it doesn't for you it's probably because you forgot to sacrifice a potato to the gods of the copybook headings.

I tried adding the times using the sum function, but it didn't work. Digging around a bit I found that times can be formatted in a number of ways, and one of those is Duration. However, when I format the numbers that way, it turns my minutes and seconds into hours and minutes. Divide all my times by 60, store the results in an adjacent column, apply the sum function to that column, and presto: 1:18:40.

Actually, I could have just applied the sum function to the original times, it would work just as well. You just need to drop the :00 off the end to get 78:40.

You could type the numbers directly into the spreadsheet, but I like to use the text editor. I can use a small window for the text editor, put it in front of the browser window and I can usually position the text editor window somewhere that it doesn't obscure the stuff I want to copy. The spreadsheet had all kinds of headings and borders and stuff, so a minimum size window is still pretty big.