Entering or Importing Times without Colons

When you enter a time into a cell, Excel keys on the presence of the colon between the hour and minute portions of the time. Because of the position of the colon on the keyboard, however, entering a colon for each time value that you enter can slow you down—particularly if you have quite a few time values to enter.

For this reason, you may wonder if there is a way to skip entering the colon and either have them entered automatically or entered all at once. Entering them automatically takes a bit more doing, requiring the use of a macro, and will be covered shortly. Entering the colons all at once can be done with a formula, as in the following:

=TIMEVALUE(REPLACE(A1,3,0,":"))

This formula assumes that the time value (without a colon) is in cell A1, and that it is comprised of four digits. Thus, if cell A1 contains a value such as 1422, then the formula returns 14:22 as an actual time value. (You may need to format the cell as a time value.)

If your original entry cell might contain a time that uses only three digits, such as 813 instead of 0813, then you need to use a slightly different formula:

=TIME(LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)-2),RIGHT(A1,2),0)

If you prefer for the insertion of the colons to happen automatically, you can use a macro. You can create a macro that will examine a range of cells where you plan on adding dates to the worksheet, and then insert the colon in the entry. This is done by creating a macro that is triggered by the SheetChange event. The following macro is one such:

Private Sub Workbook_SheetChange(ByVal Sh As Object, _
  ByVal Target As Excel.Range)
    Dim TimeStr As String

    On Error GoTo EndMacro
    If Application.Intersect(Target, Range("C7:D15")) Is Nothing Then
        Exit Sub
    End If
    If Target.Cells.Count > 1 Then
        Exit Sub
    End If
    If Target.Value = "" Then
        Exit Sub
    End If

    Application.EnableEvents = False
    With Target
        If .HasFormula = False Then
            Select Case Len(.Value)
                Case 1 ' e.g., 1 = 00:01 AM
                    TimeStr = "00:0" & .Value
                Case 2 ' e.g., 12 = 00:12 AM
                    TimeStr = "00:" & .Value
                Case 3 ' e.g., 735 = 7:35 AM
                    TimeStr = Left(.Value, 1) & ":" & _
                    Right(.Value, 2)
                Case 4 ' e.g., 1234 = 12:34
                    TimeStr = Left(.Value, 2) & ":" & _
                    Right(.Value, 2)
                Case Else
                    Err.Raise 0
            End Select
            .Value = TimeValue(TimeStr)
        End If
    End With
    Application.EnableEvents = True

    Exit Sub

    EndMacro:
    MsgBox "You did not enter a valid time"
    Application.EnableEvents = True
    ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select
End Sub

The first thing the macro does is to check to see if the data that was just entered was in the range C7:D15. If it wasn't, then the macro exits. It also checks to make sure that there is only a single cell selected and that the cell isn't empty. If all these criteria are met, then the macro checks the length of the value in the cell and pads it out with leading zeroes, as necessary. This macro is based on a macro found at Chip Pearson's site, here:

http://cpearson.com/excel/DateTimeEntry.htm

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2412) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Entering or Importing Times without Colons.