How can I speed up time-of-day data entry in Numbers spreadsheet?

There's no need to type a colon to enter a time (assuming you want a time that is aligned with the hour.. if you want 2:30 PM then there's kinda no alternative).

In any case, you can just append ' am' or ' pm' (or, even just ' a' or ' p') to an integer between 0 and 12, inclusive, and Numbers will interpret it as a time.

e.g.:

Type    => Result
'10'    => 10 (integer value)
'11 am' => 11 AM (date/time value)
'4 p'   => 4 PM (date/time value)

Hi Texasclodhopper,

One idea is to enter hours and minutes in separate columns, then combine them using the TIME function.

This formula defaults to 12:00 am or you can make it leave the time blank until you enter hours and minutes.

Numbers remembers your pattern of data entry. Type the hour, press tab to move to the minutes column, type minutes then press return. Numbers moves the focus down and back to the hour column.

Regards,

Ian.

If you're on the Mac, you might consider going in the menu to Numbers > Provide Numbers Feedback and making a suggestion there.

That is more likely to be seen by Apple engineers than posts in these user-to-user forums.

SG

Nice, Ian.

SG