Pasting column of song lengths turns into date...

Question

Hi again,
One more problem, I am trying to paste a column of song running times (listed as mm:ss) but Numbers automatically changes the formatting to a date. So if the song is 4:14 in length, upon pasting into a column, the info changes to "4:14AM 6/17/08". I have tried pre-setting the cell formatting to anything other than "Date & Time" but upon copying the info, it always changes to a date and time.
I'm sure this has to do with the fact that the song length has a colon in it, but hopefully there is a workaround since I have a lot of songs to copy in.
Thanks a bunch,
Matt
Message was edited by: mabou

Answer 1

Alison Barrett wrote:
However, when I chose "Text" before I entered the times, it didn't convert them.
Even though this pastes the song lengths as text into the cells, you must be very careful not to change the cell format to automatic at any later time or Numbers will convert the cells' values to date-times. This is not just a format change -- the cell data is actually changed from a text string to a date-time. IOW, changing the format adds year, month number, & day-of-month number components to the cell value & converts the text to hour & minute components. Unless you use the "undo" feature, the change is irreversible -- changing the format back to text will not return the cell value to its former state. Instead, you are stuck with the full date & time data, formatted according to your system's localization settings.
Worse, because Numbers interprets what here represent minutes & seconds units as hours & minutes units when converting to a date-time value, and because songs may be over 24 minutes long, you can't just use the TIMEVALUE function as a first step in extracting the song length from what may now be a mixed list of data types.
It would much simpler if Numbers interpreted time-like text string entries as if they were in minute & second format unless two time separators appeared in the string, but as it is, it is probably best to use some intermediate application to format the copied text with a prepended "00" & the local time unit separator (in the U.S., the colon) if you want to use TIMEVALUE & associated date-time functions on the pasted song lengths. Alternately, you could use an intermediate application to format the text in some format that Numbers will not interpret as time-like, one that simplified parsing the text string into its individual time units as numbers from within Numbers. (Substituting spaces for the local time separators is one possibility.)
Pages may be useful for this but I have very little familiarity with it so I can't say if it is a good choice. For this & many other text formatting chores, I use Tex-Edit Plus. It is a modestly priced shareware application with extensive & powerful find & replace features that may prove very useful here.