How to Separate Date and Time in Excel: A Comprehensive Guide

When working with dates and times in Excel, it's important to understand how Excel handles date-time data internally. In Excel, the date and time are amalgamated into a single number, with the whole number before the decimal point representing the date (number of days from January 1, 1900) and the fractional part representing the time as a fraction of a day. For example, a date-time value of 43845.7729166667 represents May 5, 2019, 18:15.

Understanding Internal Date-Time Representation

Excel stores dates as the number of days since January 1, 1900. To convert this number back to an actual date, you can use the DATE function. The time part is a fraction of a day, with a value of 1 representing 24 hours or 1 day.

For example, the number 43845.7729166667 can be broken down as follows:

43845 is the date part, representing May 5, 2019. 0.7729166667 is the time part, representing 18:15 (or 6:15 PM).

It's worth noting that if you simply want to display only the date or only the time, Excel provides a straightforward way to do this without the need for complex formulas.

Displaying Only the Date or Only the Time

Instead of extracting the data and time separately, the best approach is to format the cell to display only the date or only the time. This can be achieved using Excel's built-in cell formatting options:

Select the cell containing the date-time data. Right-click and choose Format Cells. Choose either Date or Time from the category list. Select the desired date or time formatting from the options.

If you need to have both the date and the time but in separate cells, you can use the COPY function to duplicate the data into a second cell. Then you can format one cell as a date and the other as a time.

Using FORMULATEXT and VBA for Advanced Manipulation

If you want to extract and manipulate the date and time separately, you can use functions such as FLOOR and INT to get the date part, and then use the MOD function to get the time part. Here’s an example:

FLOOR(A1,1)" " to extract the date. MOD(A1,1)*24*60 to extract the minutes component of the time.

Alternatively, for more advanced manipulation and formula creation, you can use VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Here’s an example of a simple VBA macro to separate date and time into two separate cells:

Sub SplitDateTime()    Dim cell As Range    For Each cell In Selection        If IsDate() Then            (0, 1).Value  DateValue()            (0, 2).Value  TimeValue()        End If    Next cellEnd Sub

To use this VBA code, press ALT F11 to open the VBA editor, then insert a new module and paste the code. Run the macro by pressing F5, or by running it from the Excel interface.

Conclusion

Separating the date and time in Excel is not only possible but also relatively straightforward when using the built-in formatting options. However, for more complex needs, you may need to employ some advanced functions or even VBA. Understanding how Excel internally represents dates and times will help you make the most out of your data.