Time format in columns is not correct.

[bk01eeh]

This is Excel for MAC 15.11.2

I formated a cell as mm:ss and then typed a 4:00 into the cell which displayed 00:00 within the cell but on the input line it shows 4:00:00. Any suggestions?

[FDibbins]

Hi, welcome to the forum

By entering as 4:00, you entered 4 hours, not 4 minutes - and because you only formatted to min/sec, it wont show

Try entering as 0:4:0

[bk01eeh]

Hi back and thanks for the welcome.
I must have missed something in the forty plus years I've been writing code and playing with computers, but it seems to me that if I formatted a cell for mm:ss I should be able to type 4 minutes and 0 seconds and not have to worry about hours. If that's what I have to do now, so be it. I think I'll leave it open for a day or so to see any other answers. Thanks for your time and effort..............eugene

[FDibbins]

Formatting only affects how a cell display's it's contents, not what the contents actually are. Time in excel is generally shown as Hours:Minutes:Seconds, but is actually a decimal part of 1 (day), so 06:00 AM is 0.25, 12 noon is 0.5 and 18:00 (or 6 PM) is 0.75