I'm trying to format date and time data as it comes to me from a database to use for calculations.
Sample of data:
The instrument that the data is pulled from has operators enter sample dates and times by hand, and the software doesn't allow for special characters so everything is delimited by "."'s and " "'s. If you pair that with inconsistencies with number of characters (i.e. 0's before month, day, or hour), and use of AM and PM, it leads me to have to re-enter everything by hand for calculation purposes because things get so inconsistent.
The data flow is becoming heavier so the manual correction is becoming inefficient. Is there a robust set of equations I can use to format these entries and make them useful?
I know I can use the SUBSTITUTE function to get rid of the "."'s and " "'s, and if I can get the dates into a string of numbers
i.e 06.8.18 7.28 PM -> 0608181928
I could use a combination of the DATE, TIME, MOD, and TRUNC function to generate my dates and times. However, the inconsistency of number of characters and the need to correct for AM and PM is what throws me off.
Data with sample equations:
If your time may have seconds, a forth . then this will do any number of .:
=SUBSTITUTE(LEFT(A2,FIND(" ",A2)-1),".","/")+SUBSTITUTE(MID(A2,FIND(" ",A2)+1,99),".",":")
Then apply the format desired:
You can use a nested SUBSTITUTE to replace the 3rd period with a colon, then replace the remaining periods with slashes in an outer SUBSTITUTE. Then apply a custom format as needed.
=--SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,".",":",3),".","/")
Related
Is there an Excel custom format string that will show seconds in a dd:hh:mm:ss format, but hiding any leading zero values?
E.g., it is straightforward to format 100,000 s in dd:hh:mm:ss as 01:03:46:40. However, for 50,000 seconds I would like to display as hh:mm:ss (i.e. 13:53:20) not as dd:hh:mm:ss (00:13:53:20), using a single formatting string for all values.
It can be achieved using TEXT formulas with something like:
IF(A1<60,
TEXT(A1/86400, "ss"),
IF(A1<3600,
TEXT(A1/86400, "mm\:ss"),
IF(A1<86400,
TEXT(A1/86400, "hh\:mm\:ss"),
TEXT(A1/86400, "d\:hh\:mm\:ss"))))
However this returns all values as text which doesn't allow numerical sorting of the values.
It can also be achieved with conditional formatting, but I'd prefer to use that only if I have to.
I'm hoping someone is going to tell me about the magical custom format string that will do the job!
Dates are stored as days and fractions of a day.
So, no matter what, 50,000 in Excel means 50,000 days. Before you can format it to show the equivalent hrs/mins/sec you must divide it by 86,400 to transform the value to 50,000 seconds
Once you have done that, you can use a custom number format: [<1]hh:mm:ss;dd:hh:mm:ss
However, you should also be aware the dd will only be in the range of 1-31. It will roll over back to 1 at that point. So if your time will encompass more than 31 days, you will not be able to use a custom number format to accomplish what you want.
i have hit wall after trying INT, TIMEVALUE and all other date formatting on the dates in CSV file.
I was able to change few dates using INT and then change the date format but few dates (highlighted in yellow) i am not able to convert to date format. Originally it is string, which i tried changing to Number and Date type before applying formulas but still its not getting formatted correctly.
i have tried MID/LEFT etc. to extract part of it but when joining these parts using "" & "" converts to text and converting it to date resulted in long ##### output, did tried excel advance option ticking Use 1904 date system.
Any help in right direction is much appreciated. i have not found any duplicate question similar to my format, closest i found didnt have time stamp so that formula didnt work either.
Take a look at your date format. The first digit is either 1 or 2 characters and you need to take that variation into account. the nice thing is based on your data that the days is always 2 digits. this simplifies things a little.
Lets start with the basics and assume your first string of a date is in A2. Let us start simply by striping out the numbers from the text one segment at at time while being generic about the position and number of character. So in order to pull out the number for the month, use the following formula:
=LEFT(A2,FIND("/",A2)-1)
Find will look for the position of the / character in the string and return its number. in this case it should be 2. This means its a single digit month. So we only need to pull 1 digit. In the general sense 1 less than the position of the /.
The next task will be to pull the digits for the day. We can do that using a similar formula. This time lets use MID instead of left. In order to for MID to work, we need to define the starting point. This time the general case of the start point will be the first character after the first /. The other nice part about this is we know the number of characters to pull will always be 2. As such you can use the following formula to pull the month:
=MID(A2,FIND("/",A2)+1,2)
(note if your day digits were not consistently 2 then you would have to measure the number of characters between the two / characters and replace the 2 in the formula with you calculation)
In order to pull the year the process is basically the same as for the month with some minor tweaks. The resulting formula I am suggesting is:
=MID(A2,FIND("/",A2,4)+1,4)
Now the reason I used 4 as the starting position for the find is to make the formula work for the case where days could be a single digit. It the closest the second / can be to the start.
now that you have all that you need to combine it together to make the date. This is where the DATE formula comes into play. It works in the following format: DATE(Year, Month, Day). So now we simply grab each of the individual formula and build the DATE formula which should wind up looking like the following:
=DATE(MID(A2,FIND("/",A2,4)+1,4),LEFT(A2,FIND("/",A2)-1),MID(A2,FIND("/",A2)+1,2))
if you get a date that is just bunch of number format the cell to display the date in the format of your choosing.
I am pulling Cross Country race times, and trying to convert the race time into an integer that can be easier to work with.
I am using the formula
=([Cell Name]-INT([Cell Name])*60*24
But I am so far retrieving two different time formats:
17:23.4
15:09
Both formats take that formula differently, and they are producing different numbers. The first format is changed into 17 minutes, but the other is turned into 1000+ minutes. Is there a way that I can convert these times into one format?
The main problem you are having is as tom sharpe pointed out is that some times are being assessed as HH:MM and others as MM:SS. if you look at your source data cell (assmue A2) and use the following formula it will tell you if you are dealing with text or time in excel serial date time formatted to appear in a manner we are used to seeing:
=ISTEXT(A2)
now assuming that the result is TRUE, this means you are dealing with TEXT. Adding a leading 0: to the text will make the time recognizable to excel as being in the format HH:MM:SS and allow for you to deal with it consistently.
To do this use the following formula:
=timevalue("0:"&A2)
Things may get a little wonky if ou have anything greater than or equal to 60 as the first two digits.
once you have it in the proper format you can then use it in your formula.
Background: I have been officiating our local jogging events for about ten years now. I am responsible for handling the data of the participants (name, sporting club, bib number) split into their categories (age bracket+gender, distance). The main task is collecting their times, and processing that data (sorting the runners within their category etc). I can handle this with Excel mostly fine.
Problem: What is the ideal time format for entering the race times of the participants? The times are either in the format mm:ss or (for slower runners and/or longer distances) h:mm:ss. Excel doesn't seem to have a built-in format where the hours field is optional. For optimizing my workflow ideally I would like to have a cell format such that the input
47:12 is to be interpreted as 47 minutes and 12 seconds, and the input 1:09:38 is to be interpreted as 1hr 9 minutes and 38 seconds. However, Excel, with the best fitting cell format that I found, will insist that the input 47:12 means 47 hours and 12 minutes. For times exceeding 1 hour I would input 1:03:00 if I meant that the seconds field is to be left with value zero.
How to make Excel realize that when the format can handle up to three numbers as inputs, it would, when given only two numbers, move them towards the end?
Thinking: I "can" key in 47 minutes and 12 seconds as 0:47:12 all right. But because most of the times are under 1 hour, that is partly wasted effort. Also, using such a format the data is displayed on the screen together with that superfluous 0:. What's worse (IIRC) those leading zeros
also appear in the printed versions, which is strange (insulting even) in a shorter distance for junior participants.
My hack: I enter the times as general numbers in the mm,ss format (in these parts a comma serves as a decimal separator). Excel can sort those as numbers just fine. I then duplicate the data of that sorted column to another "printable" version (formatted as text), where the data is just copied, but I correct the times exceeding 60 minutes by hand. This works just fine as long as I'm not in a hurry (our event is not exactly Boston Marathon, say, less than 200 participants), and remember to hide the column that is not supposed to be printed. This is kludgy, and there have been accidents, when other officials have been rushing me to get the results printed.
I managed to create a format where the hour-field is optional. It works with a conditional format. First you format your cells as standard, so you get the times as comma-values. After that you create a conditional format for these cells, which has two rules:
if cellvalue > 0.04166667 format hh:mm:ss
if cellvalue < 0.04166666 format mm:ss
Result:
47:12
01:09:38
01:00:00
So you get what you really want and you can use the original values for sorting and so on.
EDIT:
For the input you need four additional columns. You enter the times as you want, e.g. 47:12 and 1:09:38. In the next three columns you split these values in hour, minute and second, whereby the interpretation limit is 3 hours (03:00), which is 0.125.
So, these are the formulas for the split columns (your input is in B1):
Hours: =IF(B1>0.125,0,HOUR(B1))
Minutes: =IF(B1>0.125,INT(B1)*24+HOUR(B1),MINUTE(B1))
Seconds: =IF(B1>0.125,MINUTE(B1),SECOND(B1))
And finally, you put all values togehter in the forth column:
=TIME(C1,D1,E1)
and use the conditional format above.
If you will be entering your data as
`mmm,ss`
where the comma is the decimal point, then you can convert it to "Excel Time" with the simple formula:
=DOLLARDE(A1,60)/1440
Format the result as you wish.
If you want everything displayed as h:mm:ss then use that as your custom format (Format > Cells > Number > Custom Type:...)
If you want h to be displayed only with values of 60 minutes or greater, then use
[<0.0416666666666667]mm:ss;h:mm:ss
for your cell's custom format.
Beware that seconds must be entered with two digits always. In other words
6,2 will translate to 6 min 20 sec.
6,02 will translate to 6 min 2 sec
I really like IQV's answer above, but as pointed out in the comment section, the leading zero will be required for the data entry side. If for whatever reason this is not acceptable you can use the following ugly formula to convert your time entered in your usual method of mm,ss to hh:mm:ss with the hh: being displayed as required. Unfortunately it converts the whole thing to text which means you can no longer perform math operations on it.
=IF(FIND(".",MOD(D2,60)&".")=2,"0","")&MOD(D2,60)
and since you use , as your decimal separator the formula would become:
IF(FIND(",",MOD(D2,60)&",")=2,"0","")&MOD(D2,60)
If you use ; as your list separator then your formula becomes
IF(FIND(",";MOD(D2;60)&",")=2;"0";"")&MOD(D2;60)
There are probably some cleaner formulas, but that will get you started. Just replace D2 with the location where your time is stored.
Again I still prefer IQV's answer as you can do much more with the time information when its stored as a number and not text.
Option 2
lets say you change your data storage method to hhmm,ss in cell D6. you could rip apart the information and reassemble it in a display friendly version as follows.
=IF(FIND(".",D6)<=3,LEFT(D6,2)&":"&RIGHT(D6,LEN(D6)-FIND(".",D6)),LEFT(D6,FIND(".",D6)-3)&":"&MID(D6,FIND(".",D6)-2,2)&":"&RIGHT(D6,LEN(D6)-FIND(".",D6)))
you will need to substitute your list separator for the , and then substitute a coma for the decimal.
How do I work with a Date Time -0500 value?
I have a sheet that has a value that looks like this:
2016-05-12 21:51:13 -0500
I want to be about to use it.
I want to filter all records that are greater than
2016-05-12 00:00:01 -0500
But I do not know how to work with this value.
Use this formula:
=--LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)-5)
Then format it like this
yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss -\0\5\0\0
Then you can copy and paste the values and formatting where you want it
You need to convert the data into Excel date/times. With data in A1 in B1 enter:
=DATE(LEFT(A1,4),MID(A1,6,2),MID(A1,9,2))+TIME(MID(A1,12,2),MID(A1,15,2),MID(A1,18,2))
and format to display both date and time:
Let's presume for a moment that for some unknown reason Excel could not identify your string as a valid date time. You can always go back to basics and break your string down into its components. Let's start off and assume that your date time and offset string are in cell A1.
Step 1) Strip out the year
=left(A1,4)
Step 2) Strip out the month
=MID(A1,FIND("-",A1)+1,FIND("-",A1,FIND("-",A1)+1)-FIND("-",A1)-1)
That bad boy of a formula looks for the first - and the second - and based on that information finds the starting position to start pulling characters from and figures out how many characters to pull.
In your case we could have set it to pull two characters and had it start at character six as there is no variation to your date format. However, in a generic sense where there are not always leading zeros in the month, or sometimes you were flipping between four characters for the year and two characters for the year, the above would still work.
I am also assuming that month is the middle value (05) and you are not talking about December 5th here.
Step 3) Pull out the day
We could have used a similar approach using mid here, and again we could have hard coded it (wait, I did hard code two character return). Instead for a little flavour I used a right left sequence.
=RIGHT(LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1)-1),2)
Step 4) Pull out the time
Now you could go through the whole process and pull out hours, minutes and seconds, but Excel is usually pretty good at recognizing a time format as there is not much variation to it. Also this gives an opportunity to see a new formula for dealing with string manipulation.
Now since your time format was constant, I got a little lazy knowing that your time was always going to be eight characters long since your format always has a leading zero. As such, I used the following:
=TIMEVALUE(MID(A1,FIND(" ",A1)+1,8))
Basically, I grabbed the whole time, HH:mm:ss, and dumped it into timevalue (note there is also a datevalue). Timevalue will attempt to convert a string in time format to Excel time format as a decimal value.
Now as previously noted, if all those times are all stamped with the same -0500, just ignore it.
To get all that date and time converted into a single cell we would take each of the date parts and drop them into the DATE function and then add the time component on. In Excel speak that looks like:
=DATE(LEFT(A1,4),MID(A1,FIND("-",A1)+1,FIND("-",A1,FIND("-",A1)+1)-FIND("-",A1)-1),RIGHT(LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1)-1),2))+TIMEVALUE(MID(A1,FIND(" ",A1)+1,8))
Now if you want that to display with the -0500, look at Scott's answer for formatting. If you want to convert the time to local time and get rid of the -0500 then you would need to add -5 hours to the above formula which would look something like:
=DATE(LEFT(A1,4),MID(A1,FIND("-",A1)+1,FIND("-",A1,FIND("-",A1)+1)-FIND("-",A1)-1),RIGHT(LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1)-1),2))+TIMEVALUE(MID(A1,FIND(" ",A1)+1,8))+time(-5,0,0)
And if we were not so lazy and did not want to hard code the time, it would look more like:
=DATE(LEFT(A1,4),MID(A1,FIND("-",A1)+1,FIND("-",A1,FIND("-",A1)+1)-FIND("-",A1)-1),RIGHT(LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1)-1),2))+TIMEVALUE(MID(A1,FIND(" ",A1)+1,8))+TIME(LEFT(RIGHT(A1,4),2),RIGHT(A1,2),0)*IF(LEFT(RIGHT(A1,5),1)="-",-1,1)