Help with formulas in numbers

Dates and Times in Numbers can be tricky, and it seems way more complicated than it needs to be, considering how easy it would be to do what you want with Claris/AppleWorks.

This will work:

=Time End -Time Started

But you'll run into trouble if you ever go back and edit a time, because Numbers stores the current date inside a time record. So if today you say your time started at 6 a.m. and ended at 1 p.m., then decide to go back tomorrow to change it to 1:30, you're likely to get 31 1/2 hours.

Here's what you could do:

=24*(TIMEVALUE(Time End)-TIMEVALUE(Time Started))

Sometimes the Cell Format inspector figures out what you want. Lots of time it doesn't. Here, you'd want to format the cell as a Number offering the number decimal places you need. But it's a number (not a date value) and you should be able to easily add whatever columns you need to enter the number of hours you've been paid and to calculate the number of hours you still need payment for.

mt