August 2010

The last several posts have shown how to convert and aggregate a given number of seconds that represent song duration. A simple example because song duration never exceeded one hour. But what if your data has values greater than 3600 seconds? How would you convert those seconds into an hour:minute:second format? Luckily, the previously mentioned [...]

Converting seconds into a minutes:seconds format is rather simple once you know the component parts of the formula. We’ll use three functions. (click to review prior post) TIME(hour,minute,second) INT(number) MOD(number,divisor) For the TIME Function, the three arguments are: hour = 0 minute = INT(number) second = MOD(number, divisor) Which leaves us with: TIME(0, INT(number), MOD(number,divisor)) [...]

The MOD Function simply returns a remainder, or fractional part, after a number has been divided. To understand the MOD Function better, a look at how the INT Function can be used may provide some insight. First, the calculation example is 274 seconds converted to 4:34.  The INT Function was used in a previous post, [...]

I recently exported an iPod playlist to check the total duration of time for all songs, but found the unit of time to be in seconds. For example, 274 seconds is not a useful time format for song duration. Converting this to a minutes:seconds format is my task. Getting minutes is easy, just divide 274 [...]