Excel duration converts to date
- by Malcolm Anderson
I'm working on an Excel 2010 spreadsheet and I'm trying to put in durations for some tasks I want to schedule.The interesting thing is that up until a few minutes ago, I couldn't do it.I was entering in "47:00" and excel was (and still is) converting it to "1/1/1900 23:00:00"In my mind, I want the value to be 47 minutes, but for the life of me I cannot find a fix for this behavior.Here's the weirdest thing, I haven't had this problem in the past. Usually I put in times, add them up and they work like magic. Put in 18 entries of 20 minutes each, total them and excel will usually tell me that it's a total of 6 hours.No problem.Today, problem.Here's the weird bit:As I was writing this post, I got it to work.By formatting the column as custom "[hh]:mm" and summing the columns, I can get total times.But the times are still being formatted into dates if I look at the underlying data. Bottom line, if you need to calculate durations, you can, but don't look too closely at what is happening underneath the covers.
