It is the 4th day of Your week @ PHD and we have already posted some excellent array formulas, productivity hacks and other very useful tips.
Must read: part 1 of excel tips shared by readers | part 2 | part 3
Sticky Notes and Memorizing formula Syntax by Teyln
I have a Post-it note stuck near my monitor to help me remember the syntax of the INDEX-MATCH combo function. It says:
=INDEX(range,^,column#)
MATCH(what,where,FALSE)
The caret ^ in the Index function is where the Match function goes.
Find How Much Experience an Employee Has by Rajinikanth
Formula to find the Employee Experience, if the date Format is text like(Wednesday, March 10, 2004) :
Suppose employee joining date is Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Todays date is : =today()
then the formula to find the Employees Experience in the company like(No.of years, Months, Days) :
=((TEXT(DATEDIF(D11,E11,”y”),”0″)&” ” &”Years”)&”,”&(TEXT(DATEDIF(D11,E11,”ym”),”0″)&” ” &”Months”)&”,”&(TEXT(DATEDIF(D11,E11,”md”),”0″)&” ” &”Days”))
PHD’s note: The formula =TEXT((NOW()-E11)&"",”yy ""years"" m ""months"" dd ""days""") also works and is probably much simpler. It is mentioned in the 100 excel tips post.
Macro reduces the blood pressure by Michael
Perhaps it’s an artifact of my profession, or perhaps it’s a bias I formed back in the Lotus days.but I have never been really comfortable with Microsoft’s apparent distrust of recursion. True, non-convergent recursion can induce a migraine, but those “circular reference” alerts are almost as annoying.
So, for quite a while, I’ve had the following bit of VBA included in my Book.xlt/Book.xltm file:
Private Sub Workbook_Open()
Application.Iteration = True
End Sub
Voila! A pet peeve and annoyance resolved.
Thank you
Thanks to everyone for actively participating in the your week @ PHD. Donuts to Vishy, Rajinikanth, Barbara for sharing several tips. It has been very exciting and fun to learn new tricks from you. I hope you had as much fun learning.
Tomorrow we will have a open thread for all of you to chip in with more tips.
Also, Let me know if you want the your week to be a regular feature.














17 Responses to “Custom Number Formats – Colors”
You are right, Chandoo. I was playing with the colour numbers last week and some of them don't appear different from each other. Others are totally different from yours.
@Duncan
Each version of Excel, post 2003, renders colors slightly differently
Different language versions may also have different default color palettes
Hello in french
excel 2010
colo1 = couleur1 = black
[couleur1]; [couleur2]; etc..
@Hui, thank you very much again for this great post.
However - under Excel 2007, Hungarian version your solution does not work with color names. I've tried both English and Hungarian names, but drops an error message "not valid formats"
Do you have any idea how to solve this issue?
thanks in advance
@Andras
Without a Hungarian version of Excel 2003 I don't think I can assist
Have you tried using the colour numbers? I couldn't get the names to work (despite using an english version of excel). but it did work with the numbers though. I left out the "u" and was easily able to produce burgundy using [color9]
Here a possible solution: find an English version of Excel, write there the formats using English names, then open the file in the Hungarian version and see the translation.
In Excel 2007 I can't get the colour names to work e.g Sea Green but the numbers do e.g color3 - colour3 does not work so I must bow to the country that has stolen my language (ha ha!)
Hey chandoo, nice Tip!
Wouldn't be easier just apply some conditional formatting for negative numbers and another for positive numbers? Or there's some cases that you can't do that?
Unfortunately the TEXT function doesn't color the cell as number formatting does.
Hi Hui,
Great post Sir, love the new way of formatting with color numbers.
I am using 2007, and it leads me to the last color number 56.
Thanks Hui.
[…] explains how to set up custom number formats with a wide array of […]
Thanks Hui - works a treat!
Thank you, very helpful.
Trying to figure out if it is possible to apply color only to a part of the cell?
E.g. I have a value formatted as Accounting with a currency symbol.
Those I find somewhat distracting though necessary. If I could make them less obtrusive by coloring them gray while the number would stay black, that would be great. Tried tinkering with the format string, but didn't get the desired result. Single color for complete cell value works, but coloring just part of it could not be achieved. Maybe somebody managed that?
Exactly what I was looking for - thank you!
colour in the Australian doesn't work - we have to go American and no problem.
I always thought is was 56 colours notice you have 57. Cool.
thanks
Analir Pisani
Customised Microsoft Office Training Specialist
Sydney - Australia
http://www.azsolutions.com.au
Thank You!