How do I remove date from a time

Question

Greetings all. I have a daily report that I enter into a Numbers spreadsheet that is broken down by hour. The starting hour changes from report to report. I'm trying to create a new table that finds the earliest time amongst a weeks' worth of reports. Column A of Table 1 is for Monday through Column E for Friday. So for example: cell A1=8:00 AM; B1=7:00 AM; and C1=9:00 AM; D1=8:00 AM; and E1=9:00 AM. In A1 of my new table I enter '=MIN(A1:E1)', but receive an answer of 8:00 AM. I made sure the inspector had cell formatting set to just display time for both tables, even though only time is being displayed. I noticed if I double click in A1 of Table 1 that I see the date the time was entered even though the only thing visible when I click off the cell is the time. I'm assuming my result for the MIN formula being what it is is because 8:00 AM Monday is a lower number than 7:00 AM on Tuesday of the same week. Is there a way I can turn off that date factor and have the cell just contain the time? In other words, get rid of the date stamping. My goal is to have the answer to '=MIN(A1:E1)' be '7:00 AM'. Any and all help is much appreciated. Thank you and have a great day.

Answer 1

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.