HOUR in WPS Spreadsheet: Extract Clock Hours Without Truncating Durations

• Introduced: documented by 2019-05-23 in the official WPS lesson; original introduction is not established.
• Availability: WPS Office for Windows Personal; the lesson metadata gives no numeric release.
• Scope: exact current supported builds remain unverified; the historical Windows lesson does not establish all WPS clients.
• Checked: October 14, 2026 against complete function-specific documentation. Examples are independent expectations; no native WPS test was performed.

=HOUR(serial_number)

The WPS reference describes time values supplied as recognized text, numeric day fractions or other formulas. These examples primarily use TIME or complete date-time arithmetic to avoid ambiguous text parsing. English names and comma separators are shown.

Keep HOUR output in General or Number format. Formatting the component 18 as a time would display a serial-derived clock value instead of the extracted hour. All outputs here are independently modeled, not native WPS observations.

=HOUR(TIME(18,45,30))
=HOUR(0.78125)
=HOUR(TIME(0,0,0))

Expected results are 18, 18 and 0. The second value is the source-documented fraction for 18:45. The first input includes 45 minutes and 30 seconds, but HOUR reports only 18.

If you need 18.758333… hours measured since midnight, multiply the original time fraction by 24. That is a different result and unit interpretation.

Put =TIME(9,15,0) in A2 and =TIME(11,45,0) in B2:

=HOUR(B2-A2)
=(B2-A2)*24

Expected outputs are 2 and 2.5. Under a policy that discards incomplete hours for this short positive interval, the first happens to supply the intended whole-hour count. It is not a general duration method.

Create A5 with =DATE(2026,10,14)+TIME(9,0,0) and B5 with =DATE(2026,10,15)+TIME(11,30,0):

=HOUR(B5-A5)
=(B5-A5)*24
=INT((B5-A5)*24)

Expected results are 2, 26.5 and 26. The elapsed interval contains a whole day plus 02:30, so the clock-hour component drops that day. INT is shown only for the stated nonnegative duration policy; negative or missing endpoints need separate handling.

The WPS lesson’s employee-duration walkthrough uses HOUR(end−start). That example must be bounded to its short-interval context. It should not be advertised as a general total-hours formula.

For a time value in D2, a simple 09:00-inclusive to 17:00-exclusive clock policy can be expressed as:

=AND(HOUR(D2)>=9,HOUR(D2)<17)

Controls 08:59:59, 09:00:00, 16:59:59 and 17:00:00 give FALSE, TRUE, TRUE and FALSE. Build the controls with TIME. This works because the chosen boundaries align with whole hours.

A 09:30 boundary cannot be checked by HOUR>=9 alone: 09:15 and 09:45 both have hour 9. Compare the complete time against the intended boundary or inspect additional components. The rule also says nothing about weekends, dates or holidays.

Fractional-second rounding near a boundary, negative serials, blank/text-number coercion and exact errors for invalid values remain unverified. Recognized time text is documented, but universal locale parsing is not.

MINUTE and SECOND supply other clock components. TIME builds a clock time. For elapsed totals, retain the full date-time difference and convert days to the required unit rather than summing extracted components alone.

• WPS Academy: HOUR, 2019-05-23 (Chinese; Windows Personal).
• WPS Academy: TIME.
• WPS Academy: DATE.
• Editorial testing standards.

The complete function definition and walkthrough were reviewed. Worked outputs are independent calendar and time models; source ambiguities and native boundaries remain explicit.