Change Format of Cell into a Number (it thinks it's a date)

I am having slight trouble with the formatting of some cells. Every month I will be copying data into a row, the problem is Excel thinks it's a date instead of an integer of some sort.

The value copied will look something like this:
79:42:00
(meaning 79 hours and 42 minutes)

Excel is taking that and interpreting it as:
1/3/1900 7:42:00 AM

Is there an easy way to format this so Excel thinks it's a number (even if 79.7).

I tried to change the format of the cell to "Text", but it changes it to: 3.32083333333333

Thanks again!

if you want it to display as
79:42:00
just format the cell as custom [hh]:mm:ss
further though is to format the cell as text before pasting and it will display as text

Format as [h]:mm:ss or, if you only want the hours and minutes [h]:mm.

The brackets [ ] will keep the hours from rolling over into days.

i dont follow that it shows as a date is irrelevant
03/01/1900 07:42:00 is just a number its the format that makes it look like that
it is actually 3 days and 7hrs 42 minutes ie 79:42 or 3.320833333 days
if you divide that by 16 you get 4:58:52 when formatted as time
what result are you expecting?

Instead of it showing 3.3 days, I need it to show as 79 hours lol.. because I will be dividing that many hours by a specific number of days.

79 hours divided by 16 is 4.9375 .. that's the result I am expecting (4.9375 hours per day)
Not 3.3 divided by 16..

If I format it as text, it appears in the cell as 3.3208. If I put this formula in another cell: "=F10*24" (days * 24 hours), the answer I get is 19.. wtf? I don't even see how that's possible.

Thanks.

4:58:52 is the result when divided by 16 and as you have found out you need to multiply by 24
which would give
4.98125 hrs

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why is the cell formatted as dd ? when you do that you just take the cell value of 79.7 and display it as a day
day 79 is 19 March 1900 so dd displays 19 format as general to get 79.7

Argh… okay, well now the "DAYS ON" column is showing crazy numbers because C5 (the formula to show number of days in the month) is formatted as "dd"… But it has to be formatted like that because otherwise it shows 41,305.

Any ideas how to fix this?

New Formula.xlsx

=DAY(EOMONTH(--("1/"&A2&YEAR(TODAY())),0)) use this option instead that will give 31 formatted general

A few keystrokes shorter:

=DAY(EOMONTH("1/"&A2&YEAR(NOW()),0))