This user's frustration is entirely understandable, and entirely unnecessary. The problem isn't them, and it isn't their staff. It's the tool. Traditional spreadsheets treat time as a formatting challenge rather than a data type, and when a clock machine spits out cells in general format alongside custom time columns, the result is a mess of error values and manual cell-clicking that no one has time for.
What this person describes is a workflow that should be simple: capture clock-in and clock-out times, subtract them, and get totals. Instead, they're fighting format conversions, AM/PM persistence, and formula errors that refuse to resolve. The fact that they have to click each individual cell to get the format to stick, and still see PM values stubbornly remain, isn't a user error. It's a design failure baked into software built decades before AI could handle this automatically.
Here is what this means in practical terms: if your time tracking requires you to wrestle with cell formatting before you can even calculate a single row, you are spending effort on data prep instead of data insight. The user's machine outputs correct numbers, but their spreadsheet can't interpret them consistently. An AI-native approach would recognize those general-format entries as time values on import, apply the correct structure across all rows without manual intervention, and handle the subtraction formula without throwing a VALUE error. No clicking. No workarounds.
Our opinion is plain: this is exactly the kind of friction that holds teams back from adopting better data practices. The user isn't asking for complex analytics, they want a reliable total column from their clock-in/out data. That should be baseline functionality, not a puzzle. If your spreadsheet requires you to become a formatting expert just to get a simple time difference, it's time to question whether the spreadsheet is serving you or you're serving it. The solution isn't more formula tutorials. It's a tool that understands time the way you do: as something to measure, not something to format.