Thanks Chrissy, great information.

How would I divide the value of the cell by 86,400 before applying the date
time formatting of MM:ss?

Would I have to write a function to divide all of the values first before
applying the formatting or is there an easy way in the formatting to apply
the division process there?

Thanks for your help on this,
Aaron

"Chrissy" wrote in message
...
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