HH:MM:SS:MS Formatting in excel

Question

I have a lot of data in the form of "00:00:03:19" (hh:mm:ss:milliseconds)

I can not do much with it since excel is interpreting the data as text. Under "format cells/custom"

I can not find an appropriate entry for the data.... How can I teach/show excel what kind of data I am processing there?

Answer 1

I'm afraid the only option for Excel to read that properly is to somehow replace the last colon : with a decimal point. It's not until Excel understood your data as expected that you can think of the appropriate display format.

How are you receiving this data? If you can have all these values aligned in a single column in a csv file for example, by using a good text editor like Notepad++ you could select all the last : with ALT + mouse, replace them all at once, and finally load that into Excel.

Answer 2

One option is:

=SUBSTITUTE(A1,":",".",3)  

select, Copy, Paste Special, Values then Text to Columns with Tab as the delimiter.

Answer 3

I found another solution! I pasted the timevalues into the A column and split it via the LEFT,MID RIGHT comands

(eg:00:00:01:21 in A3)

A---------------------B-----------------C----------------D---------------E-----------------------F-------- 

00:00:01:21 --     LEFT(A3;2) --    MID(A3;4;2) --  MID(A3;7;2) --  (RIGHT(A3;2)) --    E3+(D3*1000)+(C3*60000)+(B3*3600000)