Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 November 6

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November 6

How to format numbers in Excel to calculate time (minutes/seconds)

I have Excel for Microsoft Office 365. I want to enter values such as "17:20" to represent "seventeen minutes and twenty seconds". I also want to perform calculations on these time measurements. How can I get this format in Excel? If I go to an empty cell and type in "17:20" ... the value in that cell becomes "05:20:00 PM" (in the formula bar) ... even though it displays as "17:20" on the spreadsheet. And calculations do not work as expected. I tried one of the custom formats ... I believe it was "[h]:mm:ss" ... but that didn't quite give me what I wanted. That format gave me a result that looked like this: "17:20:00". I just want "17:20" (with no trailing zeroes) to represent a time/duration of "seventeen minutes and twenty seconds". Can this be done? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 04:33, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

You would enter it with zeroes for the hours - 00:17:20. You would use a custom format of mm:ss.--Phil Holmes (talk) 08:51, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. That worked. When I added up the numbers, however, it gave me an odd result. I had to change the format of the individual cell with the "total/sum" value to be hh:mm:ss. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 16:17, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

if you want it to show minutes and seconds only, and the minutes are greater than 60, you can use the format [m]:ss.--Phil Holmes (talk) 10:31, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Resolved

Update on Fedora Linux crashes

I have yet another update on the random crashes on my Fedora 32 Linux computer I mentioned earlier. After installing Xfce, the crashes stopped. But what's weird is that I have now gone back to Cinnamon, and the crashes seem to have stopped there too. I haven't physically done anything to my computer, only installed software. Could it be that installing Xfce has somehow affected Cinnamon as well? JIP | Talk 21:48, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

@JIP, is it possible to check your logs? That might indicate where the issue is coming from. Ed talk! 14:43, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Xfce and Cinnamon both use GTK. There's a decent chance the crashes had to do with GTK, and your installs updated/reinstalled GTK, thereby fixing things. --47.152.93.24 (talk) 04:45, 10 November 2020 (UTC)