Every year, on 4th Thursday of November, folks in US celebrate Thanksgiving day.
Thanksgiving Day is a harvest festival. Traditionally, it is a time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude in general. [Source: Wikipedia]
A similar holiday exists in Canada too, they celebrate it on Second Monday of Every October.
We will celebrate thanksgiving in PHD style, by sharing a wacky formula tip.
Today, we are going to learn how to use excel formulas to find out thanksgiving day’s date for any year. Now, if only turkeys could use excel, they would be running for cover.
The formula:
Assuming cell A1 has the year, the formula to find US thanksgiving day’s date is,
To find Canadian thanksgiving date,
How does this formula work?
It is fetching the fourth Thursday of November by finding out what day of week November first is and then adding sufficient number of days to it. For eg. November First, 2009 is a Sunday, so thanksgiving day will be on 26th.
Happy thanksgiving everybody
I am in Denmark now, and there is no concept of Thanksgiving day here. But we don’t need a holiday to be thankful for all the wonderful things we have in life. I am thankful to have a loving wife and 2 wonderful kids and 6919 PHD members. Thank you.
PS: Watch out for a thanksgiving sale announcement on PHD in the next 3 hours.
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good