What does Lotus 123 syntax of the form mar:12 mean?

Can someone tell me how Lotus 123 interprets syntax of the form mar:12, where "mar" might be a month name (March, in this example) ?

In fact, in Excel, the syntax can be more generally of the form mar:12:34 or mar:12:34.567 . Is that also true for Lotus 123 ?

And can someone tell me what Lotus 123 does with inputs of that form ? How is it formatted by default ? And if it is numeric, what is the underlying value, ideally to 15 significant digits ?

I presume it is Lotus 123 syntax, because normally Excel converts that to a number (*).

But the Excel interpretation can be disabled (i.e. treat the input as text) if we enable (!) the Excel Lotus Compatibility option "Transition formula entry".

(I consider it to be a defect that we enable (!) a Lotus Compatibility option to disable some Lotus Compatibility behaviors in Excel.)

(* The converted number in Excel does not make sense to me. Presumably, it is another Excel defect.)

Edit.... Note that my computer language is English (US). Comma is my decimal point. And my long time form is hh:mm:ss.fff , where "fff" is milliseconds.

Which Version of Lotus 1-2-3? Mine is old, part of Lotus SmartSuite 9.8.0

If I Copy one of the Bold numbers in your post I get a message about no tabular data in the HTML file but if I type the same data I get nothing. If I put the same numbers in Excel 15 [Office 2013 Pro Plus] I get a long number.

Berton said:

Which Version of Lotus 1-2-3? Mine is old, part of Lotus SmartSuite 9.8.0

If I Copy one of the Bold numbers in your post I get a message about no tabular data in the HTML file but if I type the same data I get nothing.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your response and for testing the input forms.

Any version of Lotus 123 will do, for my purposes. I do not know what to expect.

(In fact, the older, the better. I wonder if the input form is an undocumented "feature", which might not have survived into more-recent versions.)

Which "one of the bold numbers" did you try to enter into L123?

I do not know that any of those forms "work" in L123. By "work", I mean: they produce numeric results.

You say that you get an error if you "copy" (paste?) the form that you tried, but you get "nothing" if you enter it manual?

I would type them manually. Copy-and-paste is less reliable, especially copying from a webpage.

But what exactly do you mean by "nothing"? Do you mean that it is treated as text? That is "something"; just not a numeric result.

So, I would appreciate it if you can take the time to try again.

I would try mar:12 , first. If that works, then try mar:12:34 . And if that works, try mar:12:34.567 .

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Berton said:

If I put the same numbers in Excel 15 [Office 2013 Pro Plus] I get a long number.

Click to expand...

Yes, I well aware of how Excel interprets inputs of those forms, when the Lotus Compatibility "Transition formula entry" option is disabled (!) , as it is by default.

And in another forum, someone has suggested how that numeric might be derived by Excel, which I have generalized.

But neither the number nor the method makes sense to me.

The numeric result in Excel is clearly wrong, IMHO.

So, I am hoping that if I can understand how it works in L123, I might get a better idea of what Excel is trying to do, albeit incorrectly.

TMI? Sorry.

I really only need you to focus on the Lotus 123 behavior. TIA.