number to text problem

[GottaRun]

excel newbie here.

I was able to cut & paste tabular data from the web to an excel sheet.
Each column under its own letter. Looks great. But one of the columns
has data that has this format 32:31:00 I want this treated as text
particularly when I import into an Access DB. But when I do
format|cell|text it changes the contents to 1.354861111 rather than
displaying 32:31:00. What I import this into Access DB it brings along
this wierd 1.354861111 instead of 32:31:00.

Note: when the cell is displaying 32:31:00 and if I click on it it
changes to
1/1/1900 8:31:00 AM This is what Access DB sees. Don't want that.
Want to see: 32:31:00. Actually 32:31, that is drop of the trailing
zeroes.

If I leave it as excel formatted it then Access treats it as some
date/time field although the Access field is defined as text.

Another column has data that looks like 7:02 or 24:02 I want this to be
treated as text. Although it does represent mm:ss in this case.

 

[flummi]

Use a help column and this formula (time data supposed to be in E10):

=TEXT(E10;"hh:mm") copy down as required

Then copy the help column and paste-->special-->values over your
original column and then delete the help column.

Hans

 

[GottaRun]

Don't understand Hans.

I got it to work by exporting from excel to a tab-delimited .txt file
and then impoting the text file into Access. Worked great.