number to text problem

[GottaRun]

excel newbie here.

I was able to cut & paste tabular data from the web to an excel sheet. Each column under its own letter. Looks great. But one of the columns has data that has this format 32:31:00 I want this treated as text particularly when I import into an Access DB. But when I do format|cell|text it changes the contents to 1.354861111 rather than displaying 32:31:00. What I import this into Access DB it brings along this wierd 1.354861111 instead of 32:31:00.

Note: when the cell is displaying 32:31:00 and if I click on it it changes to
1/1/1900 8:31:00 AM This is what Access DB sees. Don't want that. Want to see: 32:31:00. Actually 32:31, that is drop of the trailing zeroes.

If I leave it as excel formatted it then Access treats it as some date/time field although the Access field is defined as text.

Another column has data that looks like 7:02 or 24:02 I want this to be treated as text. Although it does represent mm:ss in this case.

[flummi]

Use a help column and this formula (time data supposed to be in E10):

=TEXT(E10;"hh:mm") copy down as required

Then copy the help column and paste-->special-->values over your
original column and then delete the help column.

Hans

[GottaRun]

Don't understand Hans.

I got it to work by exporting from excel to a tab-delimited .txt file and then impoting the text file into Access. Worked great.