"rino13" wrote in message
...
Is there any way to get Excel to recognize the mm:ss without having to
attach
the time to a date or part of a day? I am trying to use Excel as a
database
for my music in media player, and all my song times are converted to a
date
format! When I try to make changes to my list, my total time on each CD
and
Tape is wrong, and makes it impossible to make caluclations!

not sure how much this will help, since I never got a response on just
exactly it works myself, but the following formula will take as an input
plain numbers from one cell and subtract them from another cell and output
the result in number of minutes... I think that you could dissect the thing
and use parts of it to input your times as you need to... um maybe?

anyway here's the formula:

=IF(A1="","",(TEXT(B1,"00\:00")-TEXT(A1,"00\:00"))*1440)

again, I have *no idea* how it really works, except for the if/then (that's
for keeping the cell blank till there is data in cell a1)... but it'll take
1230 and subtract it from 1400 to give and answer of 90... in minutes that
is, rather than 170 that straight math will give you.... I guess that the
text(cell, "00\:00") is the part that converts it... no clue as to why the
multiply by 1440 is there though... BUT... I don't need to enter in a
day/date to get *just* the times,anymore, even in a hh:mm format.