Turn a route's duration in minutes into hours and minutes with INT and MOD
INT keeps only the whole hours a duration contains and throws away the rest; MOD keeps exactly what INT threw away. Together they rebuild one number of minutes into the hours-and-minutes shape a driver actually reads.
Task:
You dispatch routes for a regional delivery service. Each route's estimated duration comes out of the routing software as a single number of minutes, which is accurate but not something a driver wants to read off a phone screen before a 262-minute route. In column C, use INT to find how many whole hours are in each route's duration. In column D, use MOD to find the minutes left over once those whole hours are taken out. In column E, join the two into a single "Xh Ym" display drivers actually read. Fill in rows 2 through 6.
Interactive Spreadsheet
Hints
+5 XPno-hints bonusSolve it on your own to keep the bonus. Each hint gets one step closer to the formula.
The data in this exercise
This is the grid you start with. Cell references in the task — B6, C2 — point at the row numbers and column letters below.
| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Route | Duration (min) | Hours | Minutes Left | Display |
| 2 | R-101 | 135 | |||
| 3 | R-102 | 47 | |||
| 4 | R-103 | 262 | |||
| 5 | R-104 | 90 | |||
| 6 | R-105 | 199 |
What this exercise teachesMay contain the answer
A route of 262 minutes divides by 60 to 4.3667, and INT(262/60) keeps only the 4 whole hours that fit, throwing the .3667 away rather than rounding it. MOD(262,60) answers a related but different question — not how many whole hours fit, but what's left once they're removed — and returns 22, the same 22 minutes INT just discarded. The two numbers always add back up to the original duration, because together they split one quantity into a whole part and a remainder rather than measuring two unrelated things: 4 hours and 22 minutes is 262 minutes exactly, the same way 1 hour and 30 minutes is 90 minutes exactly for the shorter route in row 5. The last column just reads those two numbers back as text, joined with & the same way any two cells can be stitched into one string.