Don't understand why you say the number format does not work, the format
you actually used for correct display can be seen by selecting the
cell and then Format, cells, custom where you would see
[hh]:mm:ss
the square brackets keep the hours from overflowing into days.

Time and date are the same in Excel, time is a fraction of a day so
one hour is 1/24 of a day. The calendar in Excel begins
Jan 1, 2000 with an incorrect leap day added to the year 2000,
which is sort of corrected in the date 2004 format used mainly on Macs.

More information in
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/datetime.htm
you will read pretty much the same about that aspect of date and time relationship at
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/datetime.htm

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HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP - Excel [site changed Nov. 2001]
My Excel Pages: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
Search Page: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/search.htm

"LabElf" wrote in message ...
So far I've only tested this in Excel 2000, but a final solution would have
to work in Excel 2003 as well.

I'm reading data from cells in an Excel sheet and using the data to
construct ascii text files. The particular problem I have is this:
The cell I'm reading displays as "113:00:00" in Excel
The format of the cell is Category - Time, Type - 37:30:55 (and the sample
area shows "113:00:00" at this point.
The formula bar shows "1/14/1900 5:00:00 PM"
When reading the cell in my VB program, the raw value of the cell is
"4.70833333333333"
The NumberFormat property of the cell is "[h]:mm:ss"
When I read the cell with this number format (using the Format function), I
get the string ":01:00". The user would expect to see "113:00:00", which
Excel shows him is there.

How can I get the value that Excel is displaying, since using NumberFormat
doesn't work? (I know I could just tell the users to use straight text or
General format, but I would like to accommodate the users' desire to use
Excel formats to make their work easier.)
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice,
there is.