Whenever I put a dot character into a custom cell format Excel will interpret it as if I want a decimal separator in that location of the format. The problem being that decimal separator changes with the locale. I actually just want a dot.
Here's an example format that won't work:
hh:mm:ss.000
(it won't work because if the locale uses anything else than a dot as a decimal separator then you'll see something like 22:31:34,854 in your formatted value)
I've tried something like
hh:mm:ss\.000
to make Excel understand that I really want a dot. However Excel 2010 refuses to accept that as a valid format. (I've read somewhere that the \ is the way to escape a character in an Excel format string)
Best Answer
I'm afraid you have to use the "Text" cell format and use a formula that will output a text value with the required separators
Excel doesn't handle milliseconds in named formats...