Understanding the syntax of certain formulas

[jnorthway]

Hi, I am new to the forum. Although I have used Excel for years I am pretty lame. The forum has already helped in figuring out some jobs I had to do for my bosses—they think I know Excel (it is sobering to realize how much I have deceived them).

On an immediate note: Below are some formulas that I know work, but do not know certain things in each.

=LEFT(D13,5)
- I understand D13, but what does "=LEFT" and the ",5" mean?

=HOUR(H13)/24+CEILING(MINUTE(H13),15)/(24*60)
- OK, H13 is the cell with a time, but what is "CEILING"?
- MINUTE(H13) is going to incumentalize (I made up this word) an hour into 15 minutes with the ",15" right? But what is the 24*60 doing to the whole equation?

=RIGHT(D13,2)
- Again, what is the ",2" mean?

=TEXT(F13,"ddd")
- Am I right in saying the "=TEXT" is going to convert the F13 date into text?

Thanks guys and gals for your welcome and any help you can give!

Jeff

[majosum]

Welcome to the forum! My comments are in red below.

=LEFT(D13,5)
- I understand D13, but what does "=LEFT" and the ",5" mean?
the 5, or the number that comes after the comma, refers to the number of characters. In this example, this formula would return the first 5 characters from cell D13


=HOUR(H13)/24+CEILING(MINUTE(H13),15)/(24*60)
- OK, H13 is the cell with a time, but what is "CEILING"?
- MINUTE(H13) is going to incumentalize (I made up this word) an hour into 15 minutes with the ",15" right? But what is the 24*60 doing to the whole equation?
I've never used the ceiling function, so I can't give a good explanation. Maybe somebody else could. Through google, I found out that it rounds the result. Diving by 24*60 sounds like you're trying to divide it by the number of minutes in a day.

=RIGHT(D13,2)
- Again, what is the ",2" mean?
the 2, or the number that comes after the comma, refers to the number of characters. In this example, this formula would return the last 2 characters from cell D13

=TEXT(F13,"ddd")
- Am I right in saying the "=TEXT" is going to convert the F13 date into text?
check out this website: http://www.techonthenet.com/excel/formulas/text.php.

[6StringJazzer]

Welcome to the Forum! From one Jeff to another:

First, all your questions about how the functions work are explained in Excel Help. You can also double-click on a cell with the formula, and then click on the name of the function in the pop-up to see the help page for it.

=LEFT(D13,5)
- I understand D13, but what does "=LEFT" and the ",5" mean?

LEFT is a function that returns the leftmost characters in a string. The 5 tells how many characters to return. For example

=HOUR(H13)/24+CEILING(MINUTE(H13),15)/(24*60)
- OK, H13 is the cell with a time, but what is "CEILING"?

CEILING returns the lowest integer that is greater than or equal to the value. For example
=CEILING(123.4) returns 124

- MINUTE(H13) is going to incumentalize (I made up this word) an hour into 15 minutes with the ",15" right? But what is the 24*60 doing to the whole equation?

Excel stores dates and times in units of days. That is, it stores one day as 1.0. It stores 12 hours as 1/2 of a day or 0.5. It stores 1 hour as 1/24 of a day. So taking a number of hours and dividing by 24 gives the correct number to store in Excel as a date/time (you didn't ask about the hours, but there ya go). Dividing minutes by 24*60 (the number of minutes in a day) also gives the correct number to store in Excel as a date/time.

=RIGHT(D13,2)
- Again, what is the ",2" mean?

Again, the same thing as LEFT.

=TEXT(F13,"ddd")
- Am I right in saying the "=TEXT" is going to convert the F13 date into text?

Almost. It converts the date in F13 to text in the form of the day of the week abbreviated to three letters. So if F13 has "8/7/2013", the result will be "Wed".