Can you change SPSS time format to millisecond precision hh:mm:ss.sss (3 decimals instead of 2)?

[iamvs]

I want SPSS to display my time as it is originally in a format with milliseconds precision (3 decimals after seconds): hh:mm:ss.sss, but I only see that SPSS only offers hh:mm:ss.ss. So when importing my data into SPSS it transfroms into this 2 decimal format.

Is there any way, in options, an extension, or a macro to change this, to display time in format hh:mm:ss.sss?

[Art Kendall]

DateTime is stored as seconds since the start of the Gregorian calendar.

Please clarify why you would want thousandths of a second?

If you tell us more about the situation.  How was the data gathered? What is the phenomenon that is measured so precisely that hours and minutes are relevant?

[Kirill Orlov]

The most fine-grained time format is hh:mm:ss.ss, for what I know. But format is only display format, not the actual format. The actual value of any time variable is in seconds, and as such it can have any number of decimal digits. 601.0000, for example, will display as 00:10:01.00 (10 min 1 sec). But you can keep a value, say, 600.000001. It won't be displayed with such fine precision in a time format, but it it will be processed mathematically correctly.

[iamvs]

My data is originally in format hh:mm:ss.sss, so when I import it into SPSS I want it to be the same.

[iamvs]

Thanks, that is good.