Worked great - I just changed the format to Custom with hh.mm.ss. thank you
so much for your response ... this will save me tons of time.

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

And if you just give the cells a custom format:

Format|cells|Number tab|custom category
h:mm:ss

What happens?

If they don't change, then some of your values aren't really times--they're text
masquerading as time/numbers.

I'd try:
Select the range
Change the number format to General (make sure it isn't Text)
Edit|Replace
what: : (colon)
with: : (colon)
replace all

It would be like reentering the values.

Then change the number format to that "pretty" one.

Deborah S wrote:

I get an Excel spreadsheet with 5K race times that look like this:
18:29.3
18:29.7

I need to change them to look like this:
0:18:29
0:18:29

I have tried the find with this:
([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2}).([0-9])

thinking I could then use a replace like this:
0:\1:\2

However, the find always comes back that no cells meet this criteria. I have
also tried a find with **:**.* and nothing is found. If this approach worked,
what would the replace string be?

I get hundreds of these times and an automated way of changing them would be
very helpful. Thanks in advance.

--

Dave Peterson