It is very easy to customize Excel ribbon and save time. You can make a new ribbon or modify an existing one with new group of commands. This can be a huge productivity boost for people using MS Office applications.
How to create your own ribbon in Excel 2019 / 365 / 2016 / 2013 / 2010:
Customizing ribbon is as simple as customizing your coffee at Starbucks.
- Right click on ribbon area and select “customize ribbon” option.
- Now, add a new tab (or group or both) – see below for illustration.
- Add a few commands (or buttons) to your new ribbon
- Click ok and you have a sparkling new ribbon ready.
10 things you should know about ribbon customization
This is how the customize Excel ribbon screen looks.
I have highlighted 10 items on the screen. Read thru below 10 points to master ribbon customization.
- Use New Tab button to create a new ribbon tab.
- Use New Group button to add a new group of commands to an existing or new ribbon.
- Rename button helps you to change the name of an existing custom group or tab.
- Once you add a group / tab, you have to select it to add items to that group / tab.
- You can choose the type of commands you want to add to your ribbon tab / group. You can also add any macros as well (sweet!).
- Now select the command you want to add to your group
- Click on “Add” button to add the command to your ribbon tab / group.
- You can use “Remove” button to remove any commands from custom tabs / groups.
- Use the up / down arrow buttons to move your ribbon tab / group up or down. (For eg. you can move your custom tab to first, ie before home tab).
- You can export your ribbon customizations and re-use them in other computers (both ribbon and QAT settings will be exported).
Ribbon and QAT Customization – Few Tips:
Use “Hide Command Labels” option to shrink your ribbon groups
See the below illustration to understand what I mean.
Customize tool ribbon tabs to save a ton of time:
By default, when you go to “customize ribbon” screen, you only see main tabs. But you can also customize tool specific tabs. For eg. I use only a handful of chart formatting options and all of these are spread across 3 different tabs – design, layout and format. So I combined all the options I use regularly to come up with a simple ribbon tab like this:
As you can guess, the above ribbon tab appears only when I am formatting a chart.
Add groups of commands to QAT:
You can now add a group of commands (for eg. all alignment options) to Quick Access Toolbar to improve your productivity.
Minimize ribbon with a click:
Press the ^ icon you see next to help icon to instantly collapse / expand ribbon. You can also use CTRL+F1 keyboard shortcut to do the same.
Export Ribbon Settings
In 2010 and later you can Export your Ribbon & QAT to a file that can be imported to another computer, or after reinstalling Office
In the Options dialog > Customize Ribbon (or Quick Access Toolbar) options > Import / Export button at bottom of both dialogs.
Ribbon Customization Gotchas!
While ribbon customization is a great move ahead for Excel in particular and Office apps in general, there are a few gotchas. Beware of the following to avoid un-necessary troubles.
- When you add a group or tab, excel doesnt ask you for a name. Make sure you click on “rename” button to change the name to something you remember.
- You cannot add commands to an existing excel defined group. You can however add groups to existing ribbons.
- Even if you try to make a group with exactly same commands, the group may look different.
- The ribbon and QAT customizations you do are local to your installation of excel only. You have to export the customizations and import them before they work on other comps.
What is your opinion about ribbon customization?
I am very happy to see the possibilities of ribbon customizations. It can improve productivity and simplify a lot of things.
What about you? How are you planning to customize your ribbon? What tips and ideas you have to share with us? Please tell me using comments.
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"