Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 10, 2022)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003
If you do much geographic work, you may wonder if you can use Excel to display longitude and latitude in a cell in terms of degrees, minutes, and seconds. There are three ways that a solution can be approached.
First, if you just want to affect the display, you can follow these steps:
Figure 1. The Number tab of the Format Cells dialog box.
Now, if you type a number such as 1234543 into the cell, it is displayed as 123 degrees, 45 minutes, and 43 seconds.
Sometimes, however, you may want to take a decimal value that represents latitude and longitude and display it in degrees, minutes, and seconds. For instance, you may want 122.44 (which is a decimal representation of degrees) to be displayed as 122 degrees, 26 minutes, and 24 seconds. This cannot be accomplished with formatting the cell in which the number is contained. Instead, you must use a formula to achieve the proper display. For instance, if 122.44 is in cell A7, then you can put the following in cell B7:
=TEXT(TRUNC(A7), "0" & CHAR(176) & " ") & TEXT(INT((ABS(A7) - INT(ABS(A7)))*60), "0' ") & TEXT(((((ABS(A7)-INT(ABS(A7)))*60) - INT((ABS(A7) - INT(ABS(A7)))*60))*60), " 0''")
This is a long formula, but it provides the desired formatting of the latitude or longitude value. The result is text, and cannot be used in any calculations. If you want to use a display instead, you can simply divide the decimal value of the latitude or longitude by 24, which converts it into the same value ranges used by Excel to represent times. Then you can format the display of the formula as follows:
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3016) 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: Displaying Latitude and Longitude.
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