excel date time

Clarifications

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Highlight the entire column of data then use the Text to Columns option under the Data tab. Play around between the Delimited and Fixed Width options to see what works for you. Keep in mind that if you separate one column into two (or more) it may overwrite into the next columns, so insert some blank columns first.

Excel stores every date with a nominal time. It's inescapable. You can, however, choose to show only the date portion, or only the time portion. You can also convert date and/or time into text strings.

Insert a column next to the date (suppose the date is in D; insert a new column E.) Copy all the data in column D into E (either a copy-paste the whole column, or put a formula in each cell of E, =D1, =D2, =D3, etc.) Format each column to show either date or time.

You can create a text string representation of the time, =TEXT(D2,"HH:MM"), or =TEXT(D2,"YYYY-MMM-DD"). However, you can't do time math on this, such as subtracting one time from another to find the elapsed minutes.