I have built a training diary in Excel that is working pretty well for me in most respects. I’m an intermediate user of Excel, familiar with most basic features but don’t dig deeply into the program’s more advanced features. Creating it myself allows me to customize it to my needs, and I have built a few charts that show weekly time, mileage, body weight, time on a couple of recurring training races, etc. I am now entering my second year of data into the file, which also opens up some interesting charting possibilities.

The problem I am encountering is with tracking time. I have a column into which I enter daily time, and then I total this on a weekly and cumulative basis. I have been formatting the cells as time. The problem with this is that the formula that displays cumulative time never shows more than 24 hours, i.e., if I’ve accumulated 27:30 of total time, the formula displays 3:30. The Excel help feature hasn’t shed any light on this.

It has occurred to me to just format the time cells as general and enter time in minutes as a straight number, so instead of 2:15, I would enter 135 for a two-and-a-quarter hour workout. Most of my workouts are short enough that this is not too cumbersome, although it is not as elegant as I’d like. A cumulative time in decimal format is easy, although I suppose it would be possible to create some kind of conditional formula that would convert 27.5 hours to 27:30.

Any better suggestion from any Excel experts out there would be welcome, math never was my best subject.

Thanks in advance!