How to Convert Lat Long in DMS to Decimal Degrees in Excel

This short video shows you how to convert Latitude Longitude values from Degree, Minutes, Seconds into Decimal Degrees. There is two parts to this. The first being separating the DMS to separate columns for each value using text to column function, then the second using the math functions to convert the minutes and second to degrees to add to get decimal degrees.

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Closed Caption:

so this is a problem that comes up often
someone sends you want to my attitudes
that are in decimal sorry in degrees
minutes seconds and what you need them
to be in its in decimal degrees in order
for this to work in arcmap or other
Giants application school or even and so
the trick that you can use to sub to
split these up its to select the file
you need to go to data text to columns
and on pc is a very similar tab takes
the column tabs going to bring up this
wizard and with the squeezers you can
use this to split up your values
so in this one you can see that this
looks like it's fixed with so i just hit
next conflicts with i can choose where
to drop these a little splitter lines
and what you want to do is isolate just
the numbers themselves
that's going to be what is most
important
and then you get a finish
and so you see what happened here is
that it split up the latitude into
pieces and then what you can do of
course is just delete all the extra
stuff
and then here and it puts lots d lots
and lots seconds and then for the final
parts you want to convert that to a
decimal degrees and so what you want to
do here is make a new column it in
called life decimal degrees do an equal
sign that brings up the formula ability
to excel to do calculations and then you
want to start clicking and adding up
these things so you say degrees that are
hurt that you see 30-plus and then you
click on the 15 the 10 minutes so we're
going to divide that by 60
there's 60 minutes and agree and then
you push Plus and click on the seconds
and then divide that by 3,600 3,600
seconds and agree there's your decimal
degrees
once you have that formula you can use
this autocomplete function by moving the
mouse over this is part of the box it
turns to black square drag and we'll
send that form of that do the rest of
the calculation
so now you want to that also with the
longitude
you might want to have some empty cells
over here because going to want to fill
fill in those cells and so long show you
the same thing I select my values
I say data on the ribbon data and then i
click on text to column fixed with next
i activate my little break points nicely
just the numbers
I clean it up
and then I go ahead and name these
monthly well and and long s this one was
trickier because this is going to be in
the Western Hemisphere
so you need to have this actually be a
negative number so instead of adding
like we did with this formula we have to
do
subtracting so I'm gonna say people and
i'ma put a negative sign and this value
- 44 / 16 - my 18 . 46 seconds
body body 2016 and then I'll auto
complete my formulas across there you go
this is your latitude and two small
degrees you're lost