We all know that networkdays() an extremely powerful and simple excel formula can help you calculate no. of working days between 2 given dates.
But there is one problem with it. It assumes 5 day workweek starting with Monday to Friday. Not all countries have workweek from Monday to Friday. As Incubus wrote to me in an e-mail,
In Excel, the function “networkdays” doesn’t work for users in the middle east ‘cos it counts Saturday & Sunday as weekend. This is good enough only if you live in elsewhere, but for us weekend is Friday & Saturday.
This got me thinking and I ended up writing a user defined formula (UDF) to calculate working days between 2 given dates with any criteria. This will be good for calculating payrolls for temporary workers, offshore partners and of course people working countries where Saturday or Sunday or not usually holidays.
Please download the NetWorkingDays Add-in if you want to use this function.
If you are curious what is inside, see the UDF code
How to use the NetWorkingDays() UDF?
Once you download the add-in, just install the add-in by,
- [in Excel 2003] By going to Tools > Addins > Browse
- [in Excel 2007] By going to Office Button > Excel Options > Addins > “Go button” > Browse
- Specify the location where you saved the downloaded file
Now that the add-in is installed, you can use the UDF by writing a formula like this:
=networkingdays("01-06-2009","02-07-2019","12356")
The first argument is start date, the second one is end date and third one tells which days of week are working (Monday is 1 and Sunday is 7). So the above formula counts all the Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays between 01-06-2009 and 02-07-2019
Known Errors and Limitations
The formula returns #VALUE! error when you try really long durations (like trying to find all the workingdays between now and a century later)
Another thing is, you cannot feed a custom holiday list to this formula. But that is very easy to add on, so I didn’t bother.
So go ahead and give it a try
Download the NetWorkingDays() UDF Excel Add-in
and tell me what you think…
On dates and times in Excel: Date & Time Formulas | 10 Tips on Using Dates & Times in Excel
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.