Excel stores dates/times as numbers. The whole number portion
represents the number of days past a base date. The decimal part
represents the fraction of a day. 3.5 is mid day three days past
the base date.

You have a number which is seconds. To get that to display as
MM:ss you need to divide it by 86,400 to get the number to be
able to display using time formatting. There are 86,400 seconds in
a day.

Chrissy.



Aaron @ PASC wrote
Hi All,

I have a column of cells that I am getting from an external datasource
that comes to me in long value, eg: 24.589265... This value is a
representation of the average seconds to complete a task. I would like to
format the cell in 'MM:ss' but the conversion process looks at the number as
days in a year and not as seconds.
I know I could use a formula to derive the minutes and seconds but I was
hoping there is a cell formatting I could use.

TIA,
Aaron