Firstly, the backslash is used to tell Excel to treat the next character as
a embedded text character, so here I use to insert the colon (:) time
delimiters.

Regarding the two minus signs, or double unary, if you just use

=TEXT(A10,"00\:00\:00")

you will seemingly get the same result, but it will in fact be text, so you
cannot do math on it (add to it, sum it, etc.). To revert it back to a
number, you need to do some mathematical operation on it. You could add 0

=TEXT(A10,"00\:00\:00")+0

multiply it by 1

=TEXT(A10,"00\:00\:00")*1

or, my preference, apply the double unary

=--TEXT(A10,"00\:00\:00")

In this latter case, a single unary will change it to a number

=-TEXT(A10,"00\:00\:00")

but of course it will also negate it, so a second unary is used to restore
it back to its original condition

=--TEXT(A10,"00\:00\:00")

--
HTH

Bob Phillips

(replace somewhere in email address with gmail if mailing direct)

"jk" wrote in message
oups.com...
Wow! I did not know you could do that. I thought the two minus signs
following the equal sign was an error until I played with it and
realized it was a sort of replacement character. I am not sure what the
backslash character does either, but it all seems to work. I tried to
Google with that syntax to learn more on what it does but did not luck.
Would you direct me to a description of that syntax?

Thank you. -- Justin


Bob Phillips wrote:
=--TEXT(A10,"00\:00\:00")

and format as "mm:ss"


--
HTH

Bob Phillips