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Time-stamps in Excel

A project log for Rodent Arena Tracker (RAT)

A low-cost system to track and report mouse activity while they are contained in simple arenas.

lex-kravitzLex Kravitz 07/10/2020 at 19:280 Comments

RAT stores the date and time of each sample in the 'DateTime' column using the following format:

MM/DD/YY HH:MM:SS.mmm

"mmm" represents milliseconds.  For example, like this: 7/10/20 13:57:29.034

However, if you open a RAT data file in Excel unexpected things can happen.  My version of Excel defaults to showing just the minutes and seconds, which is not super helpful.


To show the full data and time, highlight the 'DateTime' column and right click to select "Format Cells".  In the window that pops up, highlight "Custom" as the format and copy/paste the following format into the box called "Type":

[$-en-US]m/d/yy h:mm:ss.000 ;@


Excel should now show the full date and time, including milliseconds, for each frame.


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