User profile for user: Living Fossil
Living Fossil Author
User level: Level 2
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Why won't the format 'duration' stick when a cell is formatted?

I have a table with a column consisting of durations, like 0:38:09, formatted as duration throughout. Now I want to sum the column. The result doesn't look like a sum of all my durations, and when I look at the format, it shows 'date and time'. So I change the format of the summing cell to 'duration'. This appears to be allowed, but the moment I press 'return', the format reverts to 'date and time' and I just can't see the sum.


I see from earlier posts that if I reformat my data cells to be more like 0h38m09s, then it might work 0 haven't tried it yet, but what's wrong with my originally formatted cells? I have checked them all and they are all really set to 'duration'. Is this a bug in Numbers?

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Aug 27, 2019 06:09 AM

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User profile for user: Living Fossil
Living Fossil Author
User level: Level 2
161 points

Posted on Aug 27, 2019 08:34 AM

Quinn, thanks. I looked very carefully and I see you are right. In a long column of durations, I had just one cell that had somehow been entered as a time, with a hidden date attached, so in my original format of 00:00:00 it looked exactly the same format as all its neighbours. When I selected the whole column and set the format to ‘duration’, Numbers silently failed on that one cell. Again when I tried to set the format of my column total to duration, I got another silent failure. The fatal cell finally showed up when I chose the ‘ ‘0h 0m 0 s’’ format. IMHO, Numbers should throw an error when it can’t apply a format. This would be extremely helpful in situations like mine.


Thanks again

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User profile for user: Living Fossil
Living Fossil Author
User level: Level 2
161 points

Aug 27, 2019 08:34 AM in response to t quinn

Quinn, thanks. I looked very carefully and I see you are right. In a long column of durations, I had just one cell that had somehow been entered as a time, with a hidden date attached, so in my original format of 00:00:00 it looked exactly the same format as all its neighbours. When I selected the whole column and set the format to ‘duration’, Numbers silently failed on that one cell. Again when I tried to set the format of my column total to duration, I got another silent failure. The fatal cell finally showed up when I chose the ‘ ‘0h 0m 0 s’’ format. IMHO, Numbers should throw an error when it can’t apply a format. This would be extremely helpful in situations like mine.


Thanks again

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User profile for user: t quinn
t quinn
User level: Level 5
7,063 points

Aug 27, 2019 06:37 AM in response to Living Fossil

Hi Living Fossil,


The only way I can reproduce what you describe is to attempt to sum a cell that has a date and time.

Reformatting your cells will give you a quick visual check that all are durations. You can still enter data as you have been (0:38:09) and it will display as 0h38m09s.


quinn

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Why won't the format 'duration' stick when a cell is formatted?

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