Excel stores time as a decimal fraction of a day. For example, 0:01 is
stored as 1/24/60 = 2^-5*3^-2*5^-1. 1/3 has no exact representation in
either decimal or binary, and 1/5 has no exact representation in binary, so 1
minute must unavoidably be approximated (the only "simple" times with exact
representations are integer multiples of 675 seconds, 45 minutes, or 3
hours). Since your fill increment is only approximately what you intended,
it should be no surprise when the resulting fill values only approximately
equal the values that you would get by manually entering those times.
The only thing here that may be remotely unique to the Excel/Lotus family of
spreadsheets is the use of decimal fractions of a day as a time storage
format. The subsequent issues of finite precision math are common to all
numeric software except for symbolic packages like Maple and Mathematica.
You can get "full" accuracy time values by using =ROW()/24/60 in cells
A2:A20 instead of trying to fill with an approximate increment.
You see trailing zeros when you try to display 19 decimal places because
Excel (as documented in Help) displays no more than 15 significant figures.
If you really want to see the actual decimal values of these approximations,
you should use my D2D function from
http://groups.google.com/group/micro...06871cf92f8465
Jerry
"excelent" wrote:
"excelent" skrev:
Hi fellows
can sombody figure this out ? :-)
http://pmexcelent.dk/Mappe11.xls
Excel 2003 DK
timevalues in A2:A20 timevalue in B2:B20
A2 and A3 is put in manual all values is put in manual
then rest is fill/copy down
A2=00:02 B2=00:02
A3=00:03 B3=00:03
and so on
then formatted as numbers with 19 decimals
as u can c they r not equal all the vay down - why?
A B
0,0013888888888888900 0,0013888888888888900
0,0020833333333333300 0,0020833333333333300
0,0027777777777777700 0,0027777777777777800
0,0034722222222222200 0,0034722222222222200
0,0041666666666666600 0,0041666666666666700
0,0048611111111111100 0,0048611111111111100
0,0055555555555555500 0,0055555555555555600
0,0062500000000000000 0,0062500000000000000
0,0069444444444444400 0,0069444444444444400
0,0076388888888888800 0,0076388888888888900
0,0083333333333333300 0,0083333333333333300
0,0090277777777777700 0,0090277777777777800
0,0097222222222222200 0,0097222222222222200
0,0104166666666667000 0,0104166666666667000
0,0111111111111111000 0,0111111111111111000
0,0118055555555555000 0,0118055555555556000
0,0125000000000000000 0,0125000000000000000
0,0131944444444444000 0,0131944444444444000
0,0138888888888888000 0,0138888888888889000