STRIPDURATION Function in Apple Numbers: Syntax, Examples and Troubleshooting

• Introduced: Documented in Apple’s Formulas and Functions Help 15.4; the original introduction release is not established.
• Availability: Supported by the current Apple Formulas and Functions Help 15.4 documentation for Numbers; no final supported-version endpoint is identified.
• Scope: Compatibility helper: Apple documents automatic insertion during some imports/upgrades and removal from copies saved as Numbers ’08 or Excel. That export transformation is not a retirement notice.
• Checked: October 14, 2026, against the official STRIPDURATION reference. Documentation and independent arithmetic checks; no native Numbers test.

=STRIPDURATION(any-value)

The single argument is required. According to the official reference, a duration input becomes a number of days, as it would with DUR2DAYS. An input that is not a duration is returned unchanged. Apple’s value-type reference distinguishes durations, date/time values, numbers, strings and Boolean values.

This is useful in a compatibility formula that may receive either an elapsed duration or an already-numeric day count. It is not a substitute for deciding what a source number means. If a numeric 12 means twelve hours, STRIPDURATION does not infer that unit and turn it into half a day; it remains 12.

Create a table with at least five columns and eleven rows. Put Description, Input and Result in A1:C1. Fill B2:B7 as follows. Enter 12 as a number and abc as plain text; the other rows begin with = and are formulas.

Enter =STRIPDURATION(B2) in C2 and fill down through C7. Keep the output cells in Automatic format, or use Number formatting for the numeric results. Row 4 is the important control: a plain number is not automatically treated as an elapsed duration.

Apple also documents =STRIPDURATION("1w") returning 7. That is a recognized duration-string example, not evidence that arbitrary imported text is always a duration. For reproducible numeric component inputs, use DURATION rather than relying on punctuation in an ambiguous time-like string.

Keep the first table unchanged. Put the numeric 1.5 in B10, representing a source that already supplies elapsed days. Put =DURATION(0,0,6) in B11, representing six more elapsed hours. Label their meanings in A10:A11.

In C10, enter =STRIPDURATION(B10) and fill to C11. Expect 1.5 and 0.25. In E10, enter =C10+C11; the combined elapsed amount is 1.75 days, or 42 hours. Put =E10*24 in E11 to check the latter number.

This works because you explicitly know that the ordinary numeric input in B10 is already measured in days. If it represented hours instead, leaving it unchanged would make the total wrong. A production import should keep a unit label or schema for every source column; STRIPDURATION cannot discover that information.

Apple says STRIPDURATION can be added automatically when upgrading a Numbers ’08 document or importing an Excel file. Its purpose is to keep a formula’s duration-versus-number treatment compatible. Apple also says it is removed from a copy saved in Numbers ’08 or Excel format. That describes a file-conversion step; it does not say the function has been removed from current Numbers.

Keep the original Numbers file before exporting. Inspect the converted formulas and key results in the receiving application, especially if downstream formulas expect numeric day counts. Removing the helper manually just because you did not type it can change the value type that another expression receives.

• Text is still text: this is expected for a non-duration string such as abc. STRIPDURATION is not a universal numeric parser.
• The value is 24 times too large or too small: verify whether the original numeric input represents days or hours. The function’s conversion result for durations is days.
• A short duration displays zero: show more decimal places. Half an hour is only 1/48 of a day. Apple’s formatting help distinguishes display precision from the value used in calculations.
• A formula error appears: inspect the source argument and any arithmetic using the result. The official page does not promise exact error labels for missing arguments or every invalid input. Use IFERROR only after diagnosing the source problem.

The import/export behavior above is documented by Apple; arbitrary string coercion remains unverified.