"jane brown" wrote in message
...
Excel 2003 cell formating - I need to enter stopwatch testing
times in minutes and seconds format. I have tried mm:ss and
[mm]:ss. With both Excel wants to add "12 hours" in front of
and "AM" behind all the values I enter. With the 12 hours the
values will not graph correctly. These values are not the
result of a calculation. I simply want to enter the values
directly onto the spreadsheet and create a graph. How do I
overcome this problem?

First, ignore how times appear in the Formula Bar. The Formula Bar has its
own formatting rules that we cannot control. What matters is only that the
time is represented internally as you wish. 12:01:34 AM is the same 1
minute 34 second since 12:00 AM is effective 0 hours.

However, when entering data, Excel always interprets 12:34 as 12 hours 34
minutes, and it always interprets 12:34.0 as 12 minutes 34 seconds (and 0
tenths of a second), regardless of the cell format.

So you can reliably enter minutes and seconds data either by explicitly
entering 0 hours -- for example, 0:12:34 -- or by entering 0 or more
fractional seconds -- for example, 12:34.0.

AFAIK, there are no other work-arounds, other than using a formula or VBA
procedure to convert your data after entry. If you need help with that, I
would need more information. For example, how are you "entering the values
directly": typing manually or copy-and-paste? If the latter, what is the
source of copy; for example, web page or text file? And exactly what form
does the original data have: always minutes:seconds, or sometimes
hours:minutes:seconds?