If I had to do this only once in my data crunching life I could excuse that.  However this is now the third time in a year that I’ve had to perform this same miraculous transformation of time. 

When recording data, I love it when people think to use a 24hr time format, as this saves a lot of messing around trying to work out if it’s meant to be 6AM or 6PM, it’s somewhat more difficult to get 6 and 18 confused.  However…there’s a worrying trend starting to appear in the data that crosses my desk.  If you make a note of something at quarter past two in the afternoon, please, for the love of data crunching monkeys EVERYWHERE, write it as “14:15”.  That magical extra dot which transforms a decimal point into a colon saves many hours of headaches when checking data prior to analysis.  “14.15” and “14:15” are very different values when you’re working with times. 

If you insist on using decimal points in time, please us a Julian Date format instead of a normal 12 or 24 hour format.  Julian Dates are MEANT to have decimal places, and data crunchers should be just as happy with them as normal times.