On Mar 17, 8:14*pm, Adam Sandler wrote:
Hello, I have a column labeled "task time". *In my spreadsheet, I have
a requirement to track how long a job's tasks take and come up with a
total elapsed time for all the work.

So if I have a manufacturing process which takes 61 seconds to set up
and it runs for 8 seconds, On row 1, I want to enter 00:01:01. *On row
two I want to enter 00:00:08. *and so on and so on until I get to the
end of the rows and total that column.

The problem is whenever I enter 00:01:01, 00:00:08, etc., then a date
gets appended to my entry!!! I even tired to apply a custom mask, like
hh:mm:ss or mm:ss, to the cell's format and the date still gets placed
in my cell!

How can I prevent this from happening? *How can I have a time type and
not have a date to go along with it?

Thanks!


Adam --

Although, I'm not sure exactly what you're describing by the date
being appended, maybe this will help some ...

* You may need to format the entire column -- if you are adding new
records that seem to have a different format from what you expect

* Excel stores Time as serial values -- the value of a Day is 1, and
time is a decimal fraction of a day

Using your entries for example ...

00:01:01 formatted as hh:mm:ss -- Excel handles this as .
000706018518518518

-and-

00:00:08 to Excel is .0000925925925926

... because these this is what part of a 24-hour day that those
values represent

The Date part is to the left of the decimal -- the Time part is to
the right of the decimal

So, regardless of how the cell is formatted, this is what is stored

Now -- if your entry did not include a Date -- it's still a
fraction of the 1st date Excel knows, which is 1/1/1900

Hopefully this sheds enough light on the matter to help you work
out a solution


- Rodney POWELL
Microsoft MVP - Excel

www.BeyondTechnology.com