Length of TIME, not TIME of day

[Claudette Goldberg]

I would like to create charts of my child's awesome swimming times showing her improvement over a period of time.
I don't seem to be able to enter her times without Excel deciding that i am entering a time of day. I am trying to enter a list of lengths of time for what will become the Y axis coordinates and a list of dates on the X axis.
How do I tell Excel that i am entering a length of time, not a time of day.

 

[bobhc]

Good day Claudette Goldberg

Have you checked the format for the time cells, are the set as numbers or dates?

A file upload would help to see if you have any problems in the way the data is entered.

 

[Luke M]

Technically, they are the same thing. Within XL, dates,numbers,time, and all stored as a numerical value with some decimal portion.
1 day = 24 hrs = 1.000
1 hr = 1/24 = 0.04166
3 minutes 3 seconds = 0.002118055

The difference is how the value is formatted. For your sheet, you should be able to format the cells, number format of Time, or use a custom format of something like:
h:mm:ss.000

That will show you a time value with 3 decimal precision on the seconds. (should be good enough for swimmers). Most charts will use the source cell formatting by default, so you should be good there. If the chart still has the wrong labels, you can do the same thing, right-click, format axis, and change the number format.

 

[SirJB7]

Hi, Claudette Goldberg!
Excel stores dates as integer values starting from 1 for 01/01/1900 (actually zero for 00/01/1900) so today is 41564, and times as fractional values ranging from zero to .999988426 for 00:00:00 to 23:59:59, so today at noon is 41564.5.
This is how Excel handles the holding of the values, now the display of them is another thing done with combinations of format masks like "dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss" or any mix of the related substrings.
Said so and considering the values that you've registered I assume that they're in the range of a few minutes, so you could format those cells as "mm:ss", "mm:ss.0" or "mm:ss.00", and enter the elapsed times as 01:15 for example if the ET is 1'15".
Does this help?
Regards!