Excel 2007: How to display mm:ss format not as a DateTime (e.g. 73:07)?

Question

I need to create and Excel table that computes daily training times. each row has the following fields: Date, Distance, Time and Minutes/Km.
My main problem is that I w

Answer 1

One convenient trick to entering elapsed times into Excel is to have two zeros and a colon before the number of minutes, details follow. For copy and paste operations into Excel without have to worry about formatting at all one can use the format 00:XX:XX where XX are two digits totaling < 60. In that case, Excel will echo 0:XX:XX in the cell contents displayed and store the data as 12:XX:XX AM. If one pastes data in a 00:XXX:XX format into Excel, or 00:XX:XX where either XX > 59 this will be converted into a fraction of a day.

For example, 00:121:12 becomes 0.0841666666666667, which if multiplied by the number of seconds in a day, 86,400, becomes 7272 s. Next, 00:21:12 would by default show 0:21:12 stored as 12:21:12 AM. Finally, 00:21:60 becomes 0.0152777777777778, also a fraction of a day.

This suggestion is made merely to avoid having to worry about specific formatting in Excel, and letting the program worry about it. Note, for Excel data internally formatted as 12:XX:XX AM one can only use certain Excel commands, for example, one can take an average. However, subtraction will only work when the result is a positive number. Such that converting times into seconds, fractions of a day, or other real number is suggested for access to more complete arithmetic operation coverage.

For example, if one has a column of mixed time formats, or times that are negative and will not display, if one changes the number formatting to General, all the times will be converted to fractions of a day.