Excel Pros! I need your help!

i'd recommend splitting the string w/ the date and time into two seperate values... the forumla in post #9, will parse the time portion, from which you an convert into an absolute time value, ...but as i alluded to earlier, for a truely robust solution, you'll also want to parse the date portion from the string... you can do this by recycling some syntax from my formula for parsing the time portion,... hint: this time use the "left" function instead of "mid", and configure it to start at the 1st character and end at N-1, ..where "N" refers to the last character in the date portion, N = "FIND("2012 ",C1,1)+5"...

 

Perfect! Thanks so much.

 

A couple of questions I have are:
Are these computer generated times?
How do you know it's the same customer?
Is it impossible for two unique customers to be within 2 minutes of each other?

 

If the cells were formated as dates before you put the data in them, you could just subtract one cell from another in an if statement e.g.: =IF(c2-c1<0.001389,do something, do nothing).

I tried just converting the existing cell to a custom date format (mmm dd yyyy hh:mm:dd AM/PM) but it doesn't change the value from a string (get an error when trying to subtract). Plus, dates are normally right-aligned whereas the data stays left-aligned after the cell format was changed. It's not a problem with the word "May". It's the fact that it stays as a string.

But entering a data into a cell that already has that formatting works as I expect.

If it's a cut&paste function from one sheet into another, you'll want to ensure the original sheet's timestamp is also of the same format so you're not cutting and pasting strings.