In article ,
"OG" wrote:

"Matt" wrote in message
oups.com...

Now so far I've been inputting the RA and Dec's in the following format
into an Excel spreadsheet:

00 03 34.43

Does anyone know of anyway that I could somehow get Excel to insert
colons into the two spaces, or get it to recognise numbers written in
this format?

================

Personally I would insert 6 blank columns after the RA & Dec column, then
use Text to Columns to break the data into 4 of them as
RAHours, RAMinutes, DecDegrees and DecMinutes

Then to get the decimal values
RAHours + RAMinutes/60
DecDegrees + DecMinutes/60

Perform calculations using the last two columns.

I've used a similar approach as well, when I didn't want to bother with
string manipulations. Where I have both decimal and sexagesimal values
in a CVS file, before importing into Calc (which is very similar to
Excel -- this Mac is a largely Microsoft-free computer) I insert two
tabs after the former and separate the D (or H), M, & S of the latter
with tabs. That way the same formulae can be used for both types of
data, as the blank M & S fields will be treated as zeroes.

--
Odysseus