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".
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