Time formatting

My children are swimmers. I am not able to use the available time formats to
work for their swimming times, the times are

mm:ss.fraction of seconds

I've put a spreadsheet to show their best times and then have columns that
list a variety of time standards. What I'm having trouble doing is the
column that shows the amount of time needed to drop to make the standard. It
should be a simple column subtraction. So far, I'm having to hand subtract
the when the minutes are long as in distance events, time standard is 5:31.78
and one swims a 6:18.92.

Any ideas?

--
Eileen

enter your time, a2 "06:18.92", it will show "6:18.9" Now format your cell, it should allready be "time: 30:55.7" in the left hand column, choose custom, it now should show "mm.ss.0" in the text column add one more "0" it should look like "mm.ss.00" Then you can do the sub formulas as normal and get the right answers.

One way:

Use a custom number format (Format/Cells/Number/Custom, mm:ss.00).

Note that if you enter a time as 12:34 it will be interpreted as
hours:minutes. If you need to enter whole minutes/seconds, do it like

12:34.0




In article <[email protected]>,
Eileen <[email protected]> wrote:

> My children are swimmers. I am not able to use the available time formats to
> work for their swimming times, the times are
>
> mm:ss.fraction of seconds
>
> I've put a spreadsheet to show their best times and then have columns that
> list a variety of time standards. What I'm having trouble doing is the
> column that shows the amount of time needed to drop to make the standard. It
> should be a simple column subtraction. So far, I'm having to hand subtract
> the when the minutes are long as in distance events, time standard is 5:31.78
> and one swims a 6:18.92.