Category: Tips

By Laserlicht / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

I wanted to buy myself a toy for Christmas. But, what to get? After much pondering I decided on that adorable little computer — the Raspberry Pi4.

It took quite a while to find a supplier who still had it in stock since I was looking just three days before Christmas. They promised delivery on December 29 but actually delivered it on Christmas eve!

I originally wanted to see if I could make some of the projects involving breadboards, wiring and the GPIO. Before I made that additional investment, I wanted to see if I could set up the Magic Mirror, not as a mirror but simply as a display on a monitor. Baby steps.

I should have bought the breadboards and wires. The programming for the Magic Mirror is not as straightforward as the numerous YouTube videos would have you believe. I got the basic weather, compliments, holiday calendar display pretty easily. I moved on to displaying my Google calendar. After many, many frustrating hours, I have given up for now.

I realized that I need to study the basics of Linux so that I can understand how to implement the directions for the Magic Mirror modules.

At first I thought this would be a simple thing to configure Excel to allow me to input military time in a spreadsheet without having to type the colon. Nope!

I created an Excel spreadsheet to track my work hours and calculate total hours in a day minus my lunch break. That was easy enough but as I entered the times I quickly realized that typing the colon was slow and tedious. “:” is a very inconvenient keystroke when it comes to typing numbers.

I searched the Internet for a solution and quickly realized that this seemingly easy auto-format issue was complicated by the fact that it involves calculation of time. If the cells contained simple text, it would be have been easy. I searched for “Excel automatically add a colon in military time.” I found a few solutions but none of them were ideal. They required “helper cells” adjacent to the cells used for input or weren’t taking into consideration that the cells contained time values that required calculations. Eventually, I found a reference to a VBA macro solution by Chip Pearson.

Now, how do I implement it? I know almost nothing about macros and I am not a programmer. I found an easy way to open the VBA editor in Excel – hold down Alt and press F11. This opens a window where you can paste in the code from Chip Pearson. The code for the macro begins below his code for entering dates without typing “/” and just after his “rules for conversion” examples.

The macro didn’t seem to do anything. Hmmm, I must be missing something simple. Yep! You must “save” the macro. So simple, try to find that in any directions.

It works like a charm. Thank you, Chip! The only thing you must do that he does not mention is format the cells as time.