Classifying times of day into sections

[benallen105]

I'm currently working on a spreadsheet to gather data on the mos
popular times of day that users are online on a particular piece o
software.

Basically I need to create a bell curve of the data, and I'm workin
with data that covers a whole month.

My data is split into two columns: the date, and the time. It'
formatted like this:

A B
1/9/2012 9:15:32

Now I want to classify the times into 30 minute sections (i.e
8:30am-8:59, 9:00am-9:29 etc etc), to show the curve more clearly. Ho
would I go about putting all that data into the right context to creat
a bell curve?

Any suggestions would be great as I'm struggling!

Thanks

 

[Steve Jones]

Could you create a lookup table of your 30 minute periods

A1 = 00:00, B1=00:29, C1=1
A2=00:30, B2=00:59, C2=2 etc
Until you get to the 48 ½ hr periods

Then look up 09:15:32 in the table =vlookup(09:15:32(cellref), $A$1:$C$48,3)
this would return 19.

Does that help you.