You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

User profile for user: Living Fossil
Living Fossil Author
User level: Level 1
147 points

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 6:09 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply
User profile for user: Living Fossil
Living Fossil Author
User level: Level 1
147 points

Posted on Aug 27, 2019 8:34 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

View in context

Similar questions

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply
User profile for user: Living Fossil
Living Fossil Author
User level: Level 1
147 points

Aug 27, 2019 8:34 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

Reply

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

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.
Learn more Sign up