Harlan Grove said:
Unavoidable ambiguity. It may be that the reason military time shows midnight
as
2400 is because it treats the minute from exactly midnight to 12:01 AM as
part
of the preceding day. That definitely seems to be the case here.
Unfortunately,
Excel treats that minute as part of the next day. To be precise, Excel
considers
that days begin exactly at 1 second after 11:59:59 PM the previous day.
Actually, when I was in the military, at least, 24:00 was incorrect,
even aside from using colons. We may have informally *said* "twenty-four
hundred hours", but in written form it was always 000000Z, in order to
avoid just that ambiguity.
Also, 2400 was always used in the connotation of end of the day, as in
"I get off-watch at 2400 hours". Something starting at midnight always
used 0000 as in "The exercise starts at zero hundred hours", or "I've
got the all-balls to oh-six-hundred watch"