Hi

The problem is Excel is trying to be helpful!!
Entries with a colon are assumed to be Time.
Thus, 1:59 would be interpreted as 1 hour 59 minutes.
Clearly one cannot have 1 hour 60 minutes (1:60), as that would be 2 hours
Excel stores it's times as fractions of a day (24 hours) so the result
(which is 0.08333 not 0.8333), and it is changing the cell format to
General.
If you reformatted the cell as hh:mm you would see 2:00
If you multiply 24 * 0.08333 you get 2 (representing 2 hours)

Similarly 1:198 is taken as 1 hour 198 minutes, which gets changed to 4
hours 38 minutes, which in General form is 0.179167.
If you do want to enter 1:198 as a ratio, precede your entry with a single
quote, which will force it to be treated as Text, or pre-format the cell as
a Text cell before carrying out data entry.

--
Regards
Roger Govier

"ViestaWu" wrote in message
...
Dear all,

just now I input 1:198 in one cell of my worksheet, it shows me 0.17916(6
is
cycling). I feel strange, cause I havn't input "=" befor it. and I don't
know
what kind of operation Excel does to me. try with 1:60, result is
0.833333333.

and I found when the number in position of 198 is large than 59(from 60),
it
will does this strange thing. if the number is smaller than and equal to
59,
the data will be the time.

could anyone give me an explanation that what excel does to me?

thank you