Knowing how to use Excel date values can help you save a ton of time in your day to day spreadsheet chores. Let us prepare for your date with the sheet using these 10 handy tips.
Before jumping on to the tips, it helps to know how excel represents the date and time.
Microsoft Excel stores dates as sequential numbers … January 1, 1900 is serial number 1, and 28 July, 2021 is serial number 44405 because it is 44,405 days after January 1, 1900. Excel stores times as decimal fractions because time is considered a portion of a day.
So you see, Date and Time are in fact numbers in Excel. Just enter a date in your excel sheet and format it as number to see its equivalent numeric value. If a date is 29-July-2021 and Excel represents it as 44406.
Similarly, 9PM on 29-July-2021 is represented as 44406.875
How-to use Excel date values and formulas
Now that you know the little secret behind date / time, lets move to the 10 tips.
1. Test whether a date is future or past
You can find whether a date is past or future or today using simple if formula like: =if(this_date=today(),"Today",if(this_date < today(),"Past","Future"))
today() is the spreadsheet function using which you can find today’s date.
2. Find the number of days between two dates
Since dates are represented as sequential numbers in excel, in order to find out how many days are between any given 2 dates, just subtract one from another. For eg. you can use =today()-date(1947,8,15) to find how many days since India’s independence (August 15, 1947).
3. Formatting dates
Having date / time in the sheet is not enough if you can not make it look like the way you want. For eg. you may want to show date as “Wednesday, 28 July, 2021”. You can use cell formatting to do this. Just select the cell with date and hit ctrl+1 and in the “Number” tab select “Custom” as category and mention “dddd, dd mmmm, yyyy” as format string.
Try these other date formats as well.
Learn more about custom cell formatting.
4. Auto-filling only weekdays
We all know that in order to fill a series of dates in Excel sheet, you just need to enter first few dates and then select the range and drag to auto fill the selection with rest of the dates. But what if you need to fill only weekdays?
You can do that easily with Auto fill option – “weekdays only” as shown on the right. learn more.
5. Find out the day of week from a given date
Finding whether a day is weekend or weekday is useful if you are making project plans or resource allocation sheets. You can do this by simply using weekday() function. For eg. =weekday("07/28/2021") would return 4 (Excel, by default starts the week at Sunday, hence Wednesday is indicated as 4).
If you would like to start the week with Monday like most of us do, use =weekday("07/28/2021",2).
6. Highlight weekends using conditional formatting
Often when you are making project plans or reports, it helps if the weekends or after office hours can be grayed out. You can do this easily with conditional formatting as shown below:
In order to do this, we can test whether a given a day is weekend or not in conditional formatting by =WEEKDAY(this_date,2)>5 as weekday() returns 6 and 7 for Saturday and Sunday.
You can use similar logic to highlight after office hours (before 9AM or after 5PM) for time values. Learn these 5 tips to master conditional formatting.
7. Adding / Subtracting dates
Since Excel dates are nothing but numbers, you can find out the difference between two given dates by just subtracting one from another. For eg. =DATE(2021,7,31)-DATE(2021,7,1) will return 30
In order to add n number of days to a given date, you can just add that number to given date. For eg. ="07/20/2021"+26 will return 08/15/2021
8. Ensuring a valid date or time is entered in a cell
When sharing your sheets with others to enter some data, it may be useful if you can restrict them to enter only valid date values in cells that require date value. You can do that using cell data validation feature in excel. Just select the cell to which you want to apply date / time validation, go to data ribbon > validation and set type as “Date” or “Time” and specify criteria.
For example, you can specify criteria like the one above to ensure that date entered is in year 2018. What more, using message option of data validation settings you can even show messages like this:
9. Insert today’s date, current time using key board shortcuts
Just go to the cell where you want to insert date and press ctrl+;
To get current time, use ctrl+shift+; ( thus ctrl+: )
Btw, if you are planning to get today’s date or current time using formulas, you can use today() and now(). Also learn these 11 very useful excel keyboard shortcuts.
10. Top Date functions for you
Excel has many Date & Time functions. Here is a list of some of the most important ones to help you use date values in Excel.
Date & Time formulas
| To get | Use this | Example Result | Function used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day of week number | WEEKDAY(date) | 4 | WEEKDAY() |
| Month number | MONTH(date) | 7 | MONTH() |
| Year | YEAR(H3) | 2021 | YEAR() |
| Day number | DAY(date) | 28 | DAY() |
| Name of the month | TEXT(date,"MMMM") | July | TEXT() |
| Same day, next month | EDATE(date,1) | 28 August 2021 | EDATE() |
| End of the month | EOMONTH(date,0) | 31 July 2021 | EOMONTH() |
| Current date | TODAY() | 28 July 2021 | TODAY() |
| 7 days from today | TODAY()+7 | 4 August 2021 | TODAY()+7 |
| Gap between two dates | TODAY()-DATE(2021,1,1) | 208 | - (minus) |
| 5 working days from now | WORKDAY(TODAY(),5) | 4 August 2021 | WORKDAY() |
| Number of working days in a month | NETWORKDAYS(DATE(2021,7,1),DATE(2021,7,31)) | 22 | NETWORKDAYS() |
That is all, with these 10 tips I hope I made your date with that spreadsheet is made little exciting.
3 Important Date formulas for finance & accounting people
If you work in finance or accounting professions, using dates is an important part of your job. Apart from all the above tips, you also need to learn how to calculate:
- Quarter from a date (both calendar & financial)
- First working day of a month
- Last working day of a month
See this short video to understand how to calculate these (watch it on my YouTube channel)
Download the file demoed in the video.
Common problems when working with dates in Excel
When using date & time related values or formulas in Excel, often you might notice some problems. Use this check list to fix the problem.
- Excel shows ##### instead of date or time values
This can happen if your cell is too small to show the value. Try adjusting column width.
This can also happen if you use incorrect values as date & time. For example, if you try to format negative numbers as date, you will see ##### - Excel cannot understand my date
When trying to convert a cell or value to date, sometimes Excel cannot understand your input. This is because Excel relies on your regional settings to understand dates. So if your usual date format is mm/dd/yyyy, then Excel expects the cells (or values) to have same format in order to convert them to dates. If you have dd/mm/yyyy values, then Excel may not convert the dates. To fix the problem, read extract dates from text tutorial
Download Date How-to & Tutorial Workbook
Click here download example workbook with several date calculations and format detail. Play with it to learn more.
Learn more about Excel Date & Time functions
- 42 tips for Excel time travelers
- Rounding time to nearest hour or 15 minutes
- How many Mondays are between two dates
- How to highlight overdue dates
Got a problem working with dates? Post it in comments
If you have any date or time related issues, please post a comment so our community or I can help you. Got an interesting tip or formula about working with dates? Please do share it so I can learn from you.
15 Responses to “Make a Bubble Chart in Excel [15 second tutorial]”
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!
Whyyyyyyyy?
The idea is to tell how to make a bubble chart. I got an e-mail from a reader recently asking how the scatter bubble is made. So I thought a 15 second tutorial would be a good idea to show this.
Did that email go "Dear Chandoo, I know that you scorn bubble charts, but if I don't do one in Excel for my boss then he'll fire my sorry ass, and my children will have to be sold for medical experiments in order for me to be able to afford the upgrade path to Excel 2010"?
If so, fair enough...it's all in the greater good 😉
Chandoo,
I am using excel 2003 and it is not working. The x axis is not the one that I enter in x axis column. Please help! Thanks.
Sorry, after few attempts, I managed to get the right result. I shouldn't select the title (header) of the table and select only the data to produce the right bubble chart.
What's wrong with bubble charts? Is there a better method for displaying scatter plots with lots of overlapping data points? Don't tell me you'd rather jitter!
@Sanwijay: Cool.
@Precious Roy: There is nothing wrong with bubble charts. Infact, it is the only way to show 3 dimensional data (x,y and sizes) without confusing your audience. Jeff is worried that people might misuse the chart. As with any chart, bubbles also have a place and time for using them.
I recommend using bubble charts to show relative performance various products in several regions and similar situations.
Also, human eye is notorious in wrongly estimating the bubble sizes (as we have to measure areas). See http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/07/28/charting-lessons-from-optical-illusions/
We can partially improve bubble charts by adding data labels, but if you have too many bubbles, the labels will clutter the chart and make it look busy.
I can't seem to find a way to plot more than ten bubbles on a chart and need to know how to add more
@KW.. why would such a thing happen. I am sure you can add more bubbles that that. Can you tell us exactly what you are doing...
Example table:
A B C (size)
Me: 25 30 15%
Him: 30 22 11%
Her: 12 30 20%
I am trying to make a bubble chart where the Y axis is A, the X axis is B, and the size of the bubble is C. There should be only 3 bubbles. I keep ending up with six (with the labels being only "Me" and "Her"). My goal is to have three bubbles, one representing each person. Clearly I am doing something wrong. Can you help explain...?
Hi,
I wanted to add data labels to the bubbles. Each bubble represents a different company name. Excel allows me to add the size, legend, x axis values and y axis values. How do I add instead- Company A, B, C, D for the bubbles?
youon you have to choice every data for every company..
ex:create bubble for A company,after that click right> add data label> adjust data labels :format data labels and choose : series name.
i hop u will succeed .
[...] we create a bubble chart with 2 bubbles. 1 for the actual mustache & 1 for target [...]
If we want bubble size to be controlled by one column, but the bubble labels to be controlled by another column, how can this be achieved?
many thanks!!!!