To all our readers & friends from USA,
I wish you a happy, fun & safe 4th of July.
For the last 4th of July (2013), we (Jo, kids & I) were in USA. We went to Washington DC to meet up a few friends for that weekend. And we had one of the most memorable evenings of our lives when we went to national mall area in the evening to watch beautifully choreographed fireworks. Kids really loved the amazing display of fire-crackers and enthusiasm. (here is a pic, taken by Nakshu, our daughter)
While we all are back in India this time, it doesn’t mean we cant celebrate 4th of July. So I made some fireworks. In Excel of course.
Here is a little Excel animation I made for all of us.
4th of July Fireworks – Excel animation
First watch this quick demo (<15 secs)
Download the 4th of July fireworks workbook
I got the Excel fireworks idea very late in the evening. So the file is not very clean. But easy to understand and play with. Download it here.
How is this made?
Lets spare the detailed tutorial for another day. Here is a quick summary.
- Lets assume a fire work goes in a straight line at an arbitrary angle between 75 to 105 degrees (90 being vertical) to a random height.
- Lets assume the firework effect creates 40 spokes of a perfect circle whose radius grows as the firework explodes.
- So we create a scatter plot with lines & spokes.
- Thru VBA, we increase the length of line from 0% to 100%, thus creating firework shooting to sky effect.
- Then, we increase the radius of circle from 0% to 100% to create firework explosion effect.
- Finally we change the previous line height & circle radius back to 0% before showing next firework.
- At last, we toggle the display visibility of message (“Have a fun 4th of July”)
That is all. Here are a few previous examples that detail some of these techniques.
- Creating a spoke chart in Excel
- Happy Diwali, animated chart in Excel
- Hurricane Sandy explained in Excel with animated chart
- Showing & hiding a message – Customer service dashboard
So thats all for now. Enjoy your 4th of July weekend and lets meet Monday with something awesome.
22 Responses to “Formula Forensic No 019. Converting uneven Text Strings to Time”
Why not let the TIME function take care of the math:
=TIME(LEFT(TEXT(A1,"000000"),2),MID(TEXT(A1,"000000"),3,2),RIGHT(TEXT(A1,"000000"),2))
I was going to point out the same thing, except to note that useing the time function and doing the divide method are not interchangeable.
I have spent hours investigating a spreadsheet working with a couple of years worth of hourly data, and found that the reason things weren't working is because the rounding on the divide method is only close to the correct time values. In order to have it work for comparisons, (like sub-totaling by time value, or pivoting) you MUST use the TIME function.
Great use of the TEXT function, Hui. I will be using this concept for sure.
Why not just.
=TEXT(A1,"00\:00\:00")*1
Regards
Elegant!
Hi Elias,
I tried to use your formula. But, it doesn't seem to work for me. I am getting an error message "The formula you typed contains an error". It seems I have the problem in using \: in the format. How can I overcome this?
Thanks
Manick, it isn't the /: that causes the problem. If you copy/paste it, you're getting “'s instead of the actual quotation marks that Excel uses. Change the quotation marks by deleting from the pasted formula and retype them.
Hi Manick...
use this alternate formula :
=1*TEXT(A1,"00"":""00"":""00")
note twice double quote each side of :
@Manick,
Did you copy the formula and pasted in Excel or did you typed? Also, do you use , or ; as separator of arguments?
Regards
@Elias: I had no problem using your formula, in fact, I have used your method to convert a number such as 20120419 to an Excel date using =TEXT(A1,"0000\/00\/00")*1. Thanks for posting.
@Joe: For date convertion you can use this as well.
=TEXT(A1,"00-00-00")*1
Regards
Sweet! It appears this also works with =TEXT(A1,"0-00-00")*1. I come from the old days when you counted every byte. I also like to try an make formulas as small as possible for the fun of it 🙂
Elias's suggestion is the simplest, but here is yet another way with TIME and MOD functions...
=TIME(MOD(A2/10000,100),MOD(A2/100,100),MOD(A2,100))
Since the seconds appear to always be 0, why not simply the input to minutes and above and save yourself the trouble of typing those zeroes...
0 => 0:00
1 => 1:00
10 => 10:00
100 => 1:00:00
etc.
Then just use this formula...
=TEXT(A1,"0\:00\:")*1
@ Rick, the numbers to convert are no typed, they are imported. Then your formula will return the wrong result.
Regards.
Hmm! My formula lost some backslash-zero combinations (two of them to be exact). The formula was supposed to be this...
=TEXT(A1,"0\:00\:\zero\zero")*1
where the words "zero" should actually be the number 0. Another way to write the formula is this...
=TEXT(A1,"0\:00\:""00""")*1
Hi Master,
While writing the formulae you have considered only upto "seconds factor" . I think you should take the centi-seconds factor also to achieve best results. Please look into it and rectify the problem...?
For Example.
In horse racing timings are noted in minute, seconds and centi-seconds, like if a horse finished in 70 seconds over a scurry of 1200 metres, is noted as 1.10 min. Nowadays it is noted in centi-seconds everywhere, like 70.00 if you want to convert it to centi seconds (should multiply by 100) = 7000 centi seconds. If you put this figure into your formula as a general number (7000) it will return as 1:10:00. As per your formula, it should be taken as 1 hour 10 seconds 0 minutes. However for a racing enthusiast like me it can be taken as 1 minute 10 seconds also.
Just look what happens if we race goers use this figure as 7000 centi seconds in your formulae, it will correctly show as 1 minute 10 seconds(?) Suppose a horse finishing over a 1200m in 70.60 seconds or in racing terms written as 1.10.60 mins, where 1 minute 10 seconds, & 60 centi-seconds can be counted as 7060, if you put this figure in the formula it will return as 1 minute 11 seconds, that is correct.
My point is if you can incorporate Centi Seconds in the formulae, it would be of great help to us also.
Thanks and regards.
Rajagopal (Mumbai)
Awesome techniques !
I tried with 235960 just to see if it will fail but this is great.
Although a little longer, this too work:
=CHOOSE(LEN(A2);A2/(24*3600);A2/(24*3600);LEFT(A2;1)/(24*60) + RIGHT(A2;2)/(24*3600);LEFT(A2;2)/(24*60) + RIGHT(A2;2)/(24*3600);LEFT(A2;1)/24 + MID(A2;2;2)/(24*60) + RIGHT(A2;2)/(24*3600);LEFT(A2;2)/24 + MID(A2;3;2)/(24*60) + RIGHT(A2;2)/(24*3600))
Converting uneven Text Strings to Time I have imported some data that comes in as a number that I need to convert to h:mm.
Just come across this while googling
find interesting challenge and come up with this
=TEXT(TEXT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,RIGHT(A1,1),""),"000000"),"00\:00\:00")
I need to convert a string of numbers representing average minutes, to reflect correct time values. For example, the numbers below currently represent 5.79 minutes, 15.82 minutes, etc.
I need to convert these values to their correct corresponding value within time parameters. So 5.79 would be something close to 5 minutes and 45 seconds.
5.79
15.82
3.92
12.40
6.70
3.62
I know there has to be a way to compute this in Excel, it can do anything, I believe!
Thank you for any and all assistance~
@Renee... You can use a formula like this. Assuming A1 has the minutes.seconds,
=INT(A1) + MOD(A1, 1)*0.6
If you want to see it in 5 minutes 45 seconds format, use
=INT(A1) & " mins " & ROUND(MOD(A1, 1)*0.6,2) & " secs"