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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 been racking my brain for hours on how to do this, so I am reaching out to some of you excel experts.
Say you have a duration represented as 1d 14:25:00 and you want to reduce that by a given percent, such as 149.5%, how can this be done?
At first I thought about going down the route of having a cell formatted in time, but when you try and do math against it, it fails.
Then I thought about maybe converting the time down to seconds and working with that, but that seems like it is total pain in the rear. It involves a lot of converting from time to number then back to time to display it. There has to be an easier way.
It depends on how you format the cell to read the Date/Time. If it's represented as a Time, then I believe the best approach is to convert the percentage into a decimal number (i.e 150% = 1.5), then use that in your formula.
However, it also requires applying the cell format to the custom format of [h]:mm:ss to include any times above 24 hours. See the image below for an example.
Time Conversion Example:
The only alternative is a "pain in the rear" - breaking the time down into seconds.
Excel includes built-in functions to convert a Date/Time into HOUR(date), MINUTE(date), and SECOND(date). Unfortunately, getting the number of days requires calculating the difference between two times: DAYS(end_date, start_date). I used this in the example above for the rows titled Conversion.
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.
I'm working on an excel 2010 sheet where I mark down the date and time an event happens. The date is in one column, and auto formats to 17-Nov when I would type in 11-17 (I was fine with this). The time is in a separate column.
I am trying to find the average time an event occurred, without regard to the date, so I would use =AVERAGE(C1:C10). However, I only receive a date back (like 17-APR).
I did not format the cells before I began to enter in data, and I would simply type in a 3:27pm event as 1527, and no reformatting would happen.
Now, when I attempt to reformat the column to hhmm, all the numbers entered so far turn to 0000. When I try to edit the 0000, it is formatted as 6/13/1906 12:00:00 AM.
What I want to do is have the time formatted as hhmm and not include a date in the cell, and be able to run formulas on it, such as the average time an even occurred.
Summary:
*Currently time is entered simply as ####. I entered 3:27pm as 1527.
*Trying to reformat the time column results in 0000 in all cells in the column that previously had a ####.
*Modifying the 0000 displays as 6/13/1906 12:00:00 AM
*I want to format the time as hhmm so I can simply type in 2357, and have it display as 2357, but understand I mean 11:57pm, and let me take averages.
*Hell, even being able to enter 1547 and have it auto format to 15:47 or 3:47p would be great.
Thanks for reading my question!
An easy way to apply an autoformat (though Excel won't see it as a true "Time") is to go into Format Cells>Custom> and use ##":"##. This will turn 1245 into 12:45. Mind you, this will be a text string so if you copy it to another cell and then apply a time, it will show as 12:00:00. Excel will also not be able to run formulas on it, but it's a quick and dirty way to make it look pretty.
Another option is to have a formula such as =TIME(LEFT(A1,2),RIGHT(A1,2),) where A1 would be replaced with the cell you are actually referencing. This will convert the number to a time that Excel will recognize as a time allowing you to run other functions on it, but requires another column.
If you are entering the times as 4-digit numbers, you'll need to do a calculation to get the hours and minutes, then use the TIME function to get an actual time:-
=TIME(A1/100,MOD(A1,100),0)
Another way is
=LEFT(A1,2)/24+RIGHT(A1,2)/1440
but then you have to format the result as a time.
Excel sees a number like 1547 as approximately 4 years on from 1st January 1900 if you format it as a date, so it will come out as something like 26/3/1904 in UK format or 3/26/1904 in US-style format.
Note that the time function can only give you values up to 23:59:59 (stored as 0.999988426), but the second method will give you a datetime value with one or more days as the whole number part. This can be useful if you want to do calculations on times spanning more than one day.
The above behaviour is because dates and times are stored as real numbers with the whole number part representing days and the decimal part representing fractions of a day (i.e. times). In spite of misleading information from Microsoft here, dates actually start from 31/12/1899 (written as 0/1/1900) with serial number 0 and increment by 1 per day from then on.
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)