You need to enter it as 00:30:15
Excel thinks that 30:15 is 30 hours and 15 minutes and that is one day, 6
hours and 15 minutes thus the date you got since Excel counts 1 as one day
and they started their dates on Jan 0 1900


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Regards,


Peo Sjoblom



"Tbloom" wrote in message
...
I have formatted a column of cells to collect elapsed times using the
custom
format mm:ss. I plan to keep a running total of the elapsed times in
another
column.

When I type in elapsed time data of 30 minutes and 15 seconds (30:15), it
converts it to 15:00, short for 1/1/1900 6:15:00 AM.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks