This is with Excel 2003.

It must be a feature.

The “text to columns” feature in excel always reformats the fields as hh:mm:ss.0 …
So if you only need to paste a couple of cells you can do it, if you are transfering a file with many rows or columns you are basically out of luck.

You can perform calculations (subtraction for start time from finish time to find race time) and this works perfectly OK.

You need to set custom display formats as already mentioned (m:ss.00 normally works for most rowing activities).

If you want to access the actual seconds value, you can also use the custom format [s] – this just displays the time as seconds only.

Finally, thanks to the explanation of the first contributor (Dick Kusleika) – I realised if you multiply a time serial (with no date) by 86400 (number of seconds in a day) – this gives you the actual time in seconds – including any fractions you’ve entered. So then you can plot time values on a chart as well.

I just updated 2 of my Excel files:

– a file with all major SWIMMING records: men/women – long course/short course – all distances – World/American/European/Oceania/African/Asian/Olympic/Championship/Belgian record. For each record: time/holder/nationality/city/country/date

– a file with all major ATHLETICS records: men/women – outdoor/indoor – all events – World/American/European/Oceania/African/Asian/Olympic/Championship/Belgian record. For each record: time/holder/nationality/city/country/date

Sources: various websites, including IAAF, FINA, Wikipedia, …

I put it on my website, but the site is in Dutch, so feel free to email me if you want a copy via email. wimmekegielis@hotmail.com

I also store the data in TM1 cubes (see http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/tm1/); I am a BI consultant mainly working with TM1.

Cheers,

Wim Gielis
AKA Wigi on various Excel boards

If you don’t know how then follow this

In Excel press Alt-F11.
The Visual Basic Editor will open.
In Visual Basic Editor (VBE) select the menu Insert then Module.

Copy and paste the following subroutine into the VBE Module

Sub RightNow()
ActiveCell = Now
End Sub

Close the Visual Basic Editor
From Excel press Alt-F8
Highlite the RightNow macro
Select Options…
Set the Ctrl key combination you want to use to execute the macro
Press OK and exit the Macro dialog
Format your cells as HH:MM:SS
Press your Ctrl key combo to insert the time into the active cell.

Hope this helps.

Also, checkout this Mr. Excel Videocast for using events. You can just use a mouse click to input the time. You will have to modify his example a tiny bit but I think you will get the idea.

http://mrexcel.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=217885

If you need to time in fractions of a second the macro will need to be a bit more complicated. The following may give you a start down that path.

http://www.dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2004/06/28/timing-macros/

Good luck

I roughed out a work sheet and was hoping to be able to enter an accurate time using Ctrl+Shift+; (I’m sort of using Xcel as a stop watch!)
But, regardless of how I format the cell, it only records hh:mm and not the seconds.
Is there any way of entering an accurate, current time in a cell (other than typing it in)?

Thanks

The point here is that Excel relies on the format of the cell to identify a date. If, instead of using +0.1, you repeat your steps using temporal functionality e.g. +TIME(0, 144, 0), formatting the cells using an appropriate date format e.g. yyyy-mm-dd hh:nn:ss, then I think you’ll find the result is zero. BTW why doesn’t the DATEDIF function support hours/minutes/seconds? (to which the official answer of course is, What DATEDIF function?)

To get back to the original question, I’d suggest that temporal functionality in Excel and VBA is accurate only to one second granularity. By leveraging double float you can achieve sub-seconds to an accuracy of 3 milliseconds but you’d stray beyond supported behaviour and as a punishment you’d have to write your own revised temporal functionality.

Further consider that the sole temporal data type in the product is designed for ‘timestamp’ data i.e. instants. I rather suspect intervals are required here, in which case I’d suggest storing the data as an integer, using the smallest time granule required (perhaps milliseconds), with appropriate formatting for display purposes.

Jamie.

–

I realised what I had done a few minutes after I had sent that last post!!

Your UDF works and the spreadsheet looks good.

Everyone, thank you very much for taking the time out to help me.

You might consider just using a Custom Format for the cells set to
0?:”00.00
and then enter 123.03 which you can then manipulate later
It’s only a slightly lateral way of working, but will certainly
sort quite happily and is much easier to enter than messing with
colons and fullpoints

Indeed there are many problems with floating point arithmetic. It is certainly not suited for many financial applications. True (scaled) decimal arithemetic (as an option) is on my Excel wish list for many years already.