How do I calculate charges based on elasped time & rate?

I want the time spent on a service to display in HH:MM

Then I want to multiple this elasped time by a rate, say $25/hour. I can
put this rate on the form and keep this cell outside the print area, or I can
type "25" into the fomula, either will work for me.

When I try to input a custom format, as described in help to be <h:mm
(where < are square brackets), the data input shows in the input field as
1:30 AM, even after deleting the "AM" part, so it refuses to treat this as
elasped time.

Please HELP!!!! I don't want to have to firgure the fractions of an hour
for each task in order to perform this calculation.

Thanks in advance

The custom format [h]:mm does not display AM in Excel XP. If you are
talking about the formula bar, that is just the nature of Excel
date/time constants. Date/time constants are stored as decimal
fractions of days from the beginning of the last century, and is just
formatted to display as dates, times, or date/times.

In a cell formatted as [h]:mm, if you enter 1:30, it will display as
1:30, and the formula bar will show 1:30:00 AM, as it should. If you
change the format to 2 digit fraction, you will see that the stored
number is 1/16 which is the correct representation of (3/2)/24 = 1.5
hours as a fraction of a day. You can add such times to get get total
billable hours. To calculate the billable amount, use
= totTime*24*25
and format as currency. The factor of 24 converts from number of days
to number of hours.

Jerry

glass-artist-web-developer wrote:

How do I calculate charges based on elasped time & rate?

I want the time spent on a service to display in HH:MM

Then I want to multiple this elasped time by a rate, say $25/hour. I can
put this rate on the form and keep this cell outside the print area, or I can
type "25" into the fomula, either will work for me.

When I try to input a custom format, as described in help to be <h:mm
(where < are square brackets), the data input shows in the input field as
1:30 AM, even after deleting the "AM" part, so it refuses to treat this as
elasped time.

Please HELP!!!! I don't want to have to firgure the fractions of an hour
for each task in order to perform this calculation.

Thanks in advance