add durations – CD tracks (Excel 2000)

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I’m totally lost trying to enter the track times from my MD recorder in mm:ss format and getting a total duration. I can’t just take the total from the MD player and avoid all this because want to combine two MDs onto a single CD and have to figure out what has to be deleted to fit onto one CD.

Last time I tried this I’m sure I did something complicated to enter the times and then used some base 60 function, but I can’t find it and I vaguely remember reading that there was a very direct way to do it in Excel. Right now I’m totally lost. I entered two times as mm:ss and did an autosum and that was right so I thought it was easy, but when I entered the rest and added them all I ended up with 7:45, which is no doubt the time of day three days later, not the total duration of all the durations.

I need help right from the beginning:
How do I enter the times – with the colon or not?
Do I format the cells first? After? What do I format them as? I tried using Custom mm:ss or [h]mm:ss, but they turn 6:58 into 58:00 and show the time as 6:58:00 AM.

How do I get the total as a duration? Thanks.

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First, when you enter the time, you will need to enter it as 0:6:45 to get 6 minutes and 45 seconds. If you enter 6:45 you will get 6 hours and 45 minutes.

Second, you should format the cells with the Custom format [h]:mm:ss (with the brackets aroung the h) to indicate elapsed time. Otherwise, Excel will show the time mod 24 hours.

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Thanks for the reply, Legare. I suppose it’s adding it correctly, giving me 1:19:45 as a result, leaving me to do the mod 60 myself to get 79 minutes.

It will look at bit dorky on my CD cover (I don’t have a CD burner with its accompanying software, so I was going to do the cover in Excel or Word) when it shows the time for the first track as 0:06:58 and the total time as 1:19:45. Is there a way to format it to display just the minutes and seconds (what’s the [h]: for if not to hide the hours when there aren’t any?, but it’s not hiding them) and to give the total of minutes without converting to hours for the total?

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Oh, I see what you want. Change the format to [mm]:ss (again with the brackets).

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Yes, [mm]:ss – that’s it . Thanks, Legare. I still needed to have the 0: entered for the hours for it to display correctly (I’m adding this comment for my benefit next time when I try to remember how this works).

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