When it comes to measuring distance, height and width, I’m old fashioned. Although we’ve been decimal in the UK since the early 70’s, I’ve been brought up with feet and inches so when someone says “how tall is that cupboard”, I naturally measure in feet and inches. I then get told politely, “and what’s that in metres?”
Using the CONVERT function, you can convert a number from one measurement system to another, for example, feet to metres or feet to inches.
But what if you wanted to convert a feet/inch value (for example, 5ft 3ins) to metres (1.6 metres)?
This tutorial shows you how.
In the screenshot below, B1 contains the number of feet and B2 contains the number of inches.
The syntax of the CONVERT function is =CONVERT(CELL_REFERENCE,FROM,TO)
CELL_REFERENCE is the cell that contains the value to be converted
FROM and TO are text entries, which must be in quotation marks, that indicate what you are converting from and what you are converting to. For example:
Suppose you have the value 5 in A1
=CONVERT(A1,”ft”,”m”) will tell you how metres there are in 5 feet (or to put it another way, it converts 5 feet to metres).
My example is a little more complex because I have feet and inches. The formula in B11 converts 5 feet 3 inches to metres.
I calculated it by converting to inches first and then converting the inches to metres.
There are 12 inches in 1 foot so I used the formula (B1*12)+B2 to work out the number of inches
The formula in B11 is =CONVERT((B1*12)+B2,”in”,”m”)
For single measurement the above example is ok but if you want to find out multiplication of length and breath to bring sqft area what is your formula
2 nos. x 5’8″ length x 3’7″ breath = 40.5972 square feet area
how will you do the above in excel
please reply
I did it like this:
A1: 5
B1: 8
C1: =(A1*12)+B1
A2: 3
B2: 7
C2: =(A2*12)+B2
The above converts it all into inches
E1: =C1*C2 – This calculates square inches
F1: =CONVERT(E1,”in^2″,”ft^2″) – This converts square inches into square feet. The answer I get is 20.30 not 40.59
how would i convert 23 feet 11 inches which is written as 23.11 to metters
@Zmarey… assuming that 23.11 is in A1…
In B1, enter the following formula: =(INT(A1)*12)+(A1-INT(A1))*100
This calculates the total number of inches by taking the 23 (the integer part of A1) and multiplying by 12 (because there 12 inches in a foot) and adding to it 11 inches (which is calculated by subtracting the .11 from the 23.11 and multiplying by 100
In another cell, enter the following formula: =CONVERT(B1,”in”,”m”)
This converts inches to metres
I have 4′ 3″ in a single cell. How do I convert that to metres?
Hi Richard – try this (it assumes 4′ 3″ is in A1)
=CONVERT(LEFT(A1,FIND(“‘”,A1)-1)+((MID(A1,FIND(“‘”,A1)+1,LEN(A1)-FIND(“‘”,A1)-1))/12),”ft”,”m”)
Hi, how do I convert chains, feet and inches into a simple metre measurement?
The value is 4’4″ after i will change value to 10’10”. But I want one Formula for both formats