Format specific cells in a column I have a column of times in different formats.

Question

Format specific cells in a column

I have a column of times in different formats. Some are simply military time in the format of a number (ie 1543), and some have colons with seconds indicated (15:43:00). All seconds are 00, so I can disregard them. I want to convert all of these numbers to one format of 15:43.

Time 1519 1707 848 1510 1713 22:26:00 947 1509 1532 2149 854 1020 1012 1855 1713 1703 1026 1313 1214 1418 1458 19:24:00 951 1222 1259 1335 1231 2345 1325 1330 1508 1600 1606 2028 2033 955 1156 2108 1218 941 930 1121 1002 1157 1148 20:53:00 11:31:00 16:23:00 929

Explanation / Answer

The problem is that none of the entries that lack a colon (:) are able to be parsed by Excel as Time -- 'military' or otherwise -- because they have not been entered in a compliant manner.

Even though spoken as 'twenty-three hundred' or 'fifteen thirty-five' the values still have to be entered using valid Time syntax -- 23:00, 15:35, etc. When entered as 2300 or 1535 they can be interpreted only as numerical values of two thousand three hundred & one thousand five hundred thirty-five. Simply formatting the cells as Time will not [correctly] convert the numerical entries to time values.

Unless someone can provide you with an automated means of properly inserting the colons you'll have to type them into the appropriate locations.

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