Traditional spreadsheets have a blind spot, and it strikes precisely when you need them most: at midnight. The user who posted about averaging times across both sides of midnight has hit on a real, everyday frustration. When you feed a spreadsheet times like 1:19 AM and 10:51 PM, the tool doesn't understand that the early morning hour belongs to the *next* day. It treats 1:19 AM as a smaller number than 10:51 PM, so the average lands at noon. The user's instinct to use 25:19 is correct in spirit, but the software simply refuses to interpret it. This is not a user error. It is a design limitation baked into how traditional spreadsheets handle time, they treat it as a flat, 24-hour circle rather than a continuous, linear progression.
What this means in practice is that anyone working with shift schedules, overnight logs, or global team handoffs is forced to become a workaround specialist. You end up adding a day column, splitting times into separate date and time fields, or writing convoluted conditional formulas that check whether a time is before noon and then add 24 hours to "morning" values. Every one of these hacks adds friction and a potential point of failure. The user in this case tried the logical fix, converting AM times to their 24-hour equivalents past midnight, and the spreadsheet simply ignored the instruction. That is not a tool that empowers you. That is a tool that punishes you for having data that doesn't fit its assumptions.
An AI-native approach to this problem would not ask you to manually reclassify your data. It would recognize the context: a list of times that includes both 1:19 AM and 10:51 PM is almost certainly spanning a single overnight period. The system could infer that the early AM hours belong to the following day and automatically adjust the calculation. It could also surface a clear, plain-language explanation of what it did and why, so you remain in control. The goal is not to replace your judgment but to eliminate the silent trap that traditional spreadsheets set for anyone who works across midnight. You should spend your energy on the analysis, not on debugging a time-averaging formula.
The practical takeaway here is straightforward: if your data routinely crosses midnight, you need a tool that understands time as a continuous line, not a circular dial. The workaround you build today will break tomorrow when someone adds a 12:05 AM entry to a list that starts at 11:00 PM. The solution is not a better formula, it is a smarter foundation.