 <p>Dates and times in Excel are stored as floating point numbers. Dates are days since 1900 (a date of 1 is 01/01/1900), and times are fractions of a day (so 0.5 is 12 hours).</p> <p>Depending on what format you need the value to be in before you put it in a database, then you might just want to take the numeric value and multiple by 24 to get the hours and fractional hours, eg:</p> <pre><code>double time = cell.getNumericCellValue() * 24; int hours = (int)time; int minutes = (time - hours) * 60; </code></pre> <p>Alternately, if you want a string, then the DataFormatter class will happily format a value of 1.5 as HH:MM to 36:00</p>