Hi folks

I have a report which, when exporting, has three colums - one shows an
original allowance, column 2 shows debits against this, column 3 shows
the net balance.

Unfortunately, as this report exports as text not values, it shows a
negative value for a time.

How can I convert this negative time into a positive figure for use
for calculations (I need to be able to put it somewhere else for
calculation purposes) - it must be done within the formula or via
formatting. I have tried the following in a bewildering array of
formulas and conjunctions without any luck at all - ABS / CONVERT /
VALUE (the VALUE function works just fine for the figure in the
Allowance column, and also where the Balance figure is a positive
number.)

Small example:-

        Allowance        Debits        Balance
25/02/2008        98:00        - 107:30        - 9:30

26/02/2008        98:00        - 83:00        15:00

Any help / advice / pointer will be greatly appreciated

Cheers muchly in advance

Neil Kennedy