How do I remove date from a time

Hello

You may a feature of Numbers.

Many users don't understand that when we enter a time value, the app change it into a date time one.

To check what I wrote, enter a time value in B2 14:18
in C2 enter =B
you will see a full dateTime.

So, if you want to compare time values we must use formulas extracting the time from the dateTime.

Now, in D2 enter
=TIME(HOUR(C),MINUTE(C),SECOND(C))

This will return a full DateTime too but the date will be the same in every cell: 01/01/1904 so, comparisons will be valid.

I know that it may seem to be odd but the designers made a choice and the cells behavior is coherent with this choice.

I would have made a different choice but it's an other story;-)

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE dimanche 25 mai 2008 20:26:56)

Other spreadsheets handle time values as date/time. Just the starting date is day 0. If you only have the fractional value (less than 1), you'll have the time only (at a fraction of a day). See below.

Regards,

Yesterdays I wished to explain why we have to strip the date.
When we want to make calculations upon time values, we may work with a simpler formula:

B2 10/05/2008 11:22:33

C2 =TIMEVALUE(B)

It will return the decimal representation of the time knowing that 1.0000 represents 24 hours which means 1 day and 0:00:00 timeValue.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE lundi 26 mai 2008 09:05:35)

Keep in mind that in Numbers, time data always represents a completely specified *moment in time*, even if a cell is set to display only some portion of it. There is no predefined data type for any other kind of time data, such as a recurring time-of-day or a duration, that isn't associated with a specific date.

Unfortunately, if you allow Numbers to pick the data type automatically (which is the default behavior), it will always assume that any cell entry that looks like a time is a specific moment in time, even if it isn't, & add a date to its cell value. For example, "8:00 AM" will automatically be interpreted as 8:00 AM on a specific date. If there is no explicit date already set for the cell, it will be set to one of several dates, depending on how the data was put into the cell, but the rules for this are not completely intuitive or obvious. When you check the entry's date, you may find Apple's traditional default 'day one' value, currently the first day of January of 1904, but you also might find the date when the cell's value was first entered!

Worse, even if you intentionally don't include an AM or PM reference & manually enter just "8:00," as you might want to do to enter a time duration value, the automatic data type feature will set the entry to 8:00 AM on the current date. But if you import such values into a range of Numbers cells, you may find some other date value instead.

(I assume here for the sake of example that the results are independent of the date & time formats set in system preferences. If this isn't true, the results may vary if you aren't using the U.S. defaults.)

Also note that all the various pre-defined date & time functions operate only on the date & time data class, & that there are no provided functions to coerce or convert other data types to the date & time class.

Thus, if you want your Numbers spreadsheets to reliably deal with any & all forms of time values, you have your work cut out for you. You may have to create individual cells for numeric time units like hours & minutes, or possibly use a text data cell to hold the raw value & complex text functions to parse the time value from it.

In this respect, Numbers is very much a "version 1.0" product that could stand quite a bit of improvement.