Story of Johnny, Hard working atom splitter:
Meet Johnny, who lives by the intersection of lane 2345, and BAG street. Johnny (or little Jon as friends call him) is a hard working family guy. He works at local nuclear power plant in a neighborhood named Sheet3. Due to a recent re-organization at work place, Jon found himself reporting to an almost crazy boss named “Bill Lumbergh”.
Now, Lumbergh is not your everyday crazy boss, he is so much more than that. So, one day Lumbergh walks over to Jon’s desk and tells him, “Look Jon, we are having issues in the particle accelerator in the basement. It doesn’t seem to split atoms alright. So I need you to go there and split atoms manually. We got 12,789,000 atoms to be split before next weekend. So I am gonna go ahead and ask you to work on it. Ummkay?”
Just when Johnny thought of uttering a curse, Lumbergh came back and reminded, “Oh Johnny, remember to log how much time you are spending splitting atoms. I need you to tell me how many hours you worked for every million atoms. Make sure you follow the latest Timesheet report formats, or else…,”
Johnny muttered a couple of real ugly cuss words that are not blog worthy and went about his business of splitting atoms. He managed split only 11 million of them before the deadline given by Lumbergh. Those darned atoms!
Also, Johnny logged the time he spent for every million atoms using, well, excel. Like this:

Your homework:
Johnny needs your help to figure out how many hours he worked in total (as well as for each million). He is already tired hunting a missing electron in the basement alleys. So don’t tell him to count manually. He wants to have an excel formula that tells him how many hours he worked given a start and end date in cells A1 and A2 respectively. Remember,
- Johnny never works after 6pm or before 9am
- Johnny never works on weekends.
- Lets say Johnny doesnt take any lunch breaks (he has developed a taste for those higgs bosons sandwich with positron milk shake).
So I am gonna go ahead and ask you to complete this homework before the weekend. When you got the correct formula, come back here and post it in comments. Ummkay?
More excel homework:
- Find out days overlapped between 2 dates
- Average of top 5 values
- More Home work | Formula tutorials & examples
PS: If you feel lost, that is because you have not seen office space. Go watch it.
PPS: if you still feel lost, that is because you do not know NETWORKDAYS. Go learn it.














15 Responses to “Christmas Gift List – Set your budget and track gifts using Excel”
[...] Christmas Gift List – Set your budget and track gifts using Excel … [...]
I'm confused: if you spend $10, and your budget is $40, shouldn't the amount in the "Within Budget?" column stay black, since you didn't go over budget?
In other words, since we overspent on the electronic photo frame, shouldn't the $8 cell turn red?
@JP.. maybe Steven is encouraging consumerism... ?
I havent realized it earlier, but now I see it. If you unprotect the sheet, you can change the formula in Column I to =IF(G13=0;" ";F13-G13) from =IF(G13=0;" ";G13-F13), that should correct the behavior.
Thanks Chandoo. I thought of making a shopping list spreadsheet for Christmas, but this is neat so I think I'll use this instead.
Chandoo & Steven thanks for this spreadsheet. But for the sake of a person who has been staring at this megaformula in vain for the last 40 mins and not afraid to ask, would it be possible for you to walk us through the logic used here?
=SUM(SUMPRODUCT(SUBTOTAL(3,OFFSET($K$13:$K$62,ROW($K$13:$K$62)-MIN(ROW($K$13:$K$62)),0,1)),--($K$13:$K$62="-"))+SUMPRODUCT(SUBTOTAL(3,OFFSET($K$13:$K$62,ROW($K$13:$K$62)-MIN(ROW($K$13:$K$62)),0,1)),--($K$13:$K$62="0")))&" / "&SUBTOTAL(2,$G$13:$G$62)
Thanks Chandoo.. This is one of the best budget spreadsheets I've ever seen.. The Arrays are out of this world!! And it's FREE!!
Chandoo, can you tell us more about Steven? Does he have his own site?
JP, I think Chandoo changed it when he changed the currency formatting from £ to $, a negative figure is a good thing in this case. But don't change the formulas, the overbudget and under budget won't work properly if you do. Also Chandoo I think you've accidentally broke the conditional formatting for the alternating row colouring the formula is different to the version I sent you. As for the megaformula chrisham, it gave me a headache trying to get it all working, so I will let Chandoo talk you through it.
Hi,
In cells I6 and I7, I understand that subtotal together with offset function returns an array of ones after which, the sumproduct function gives the desired result.
But I’m not able to figure out the reason for using an array in I8 to return the most expensive gift.
Can’t the formula be just
“=VLOOKUP(SUBTOTAL(4,$G$13:$G$62),$G$13:$J$62,4,0)”
Savithri, Cell I8 needs the array, if the formula was “=VLOOKUP(SUBTOTAL(4,$G$13:$G$62),$G$13:$J$62,4,0)” it would find the highest price from the filtered range (i.e. highest actual in filtered range is $50) BUT then return the first person with that actual, not looking in just the filtered range (so first person on the list with a $50 actual.)
To see what I mean, change the formula, then change all the actuals to $50 then filter for baby, it lists the first name on the list.
But a good question 🙂
Thank you. I now realise that the array is used to get the ‘filtered range’ instead of the entire range, as table array for look up value.
[...] Download This Template [...]
this looks like an awesome excel sheet!! is there anyway i can get it emailed to me unprotected? for some reason, i am unable to download it 🙁 help!!
Hi I also can not download to a mac as the sheet is protected any help would be great
[...] to send her a pricey present. Rather, send a card with a picture of your child. Here’s a cool Excel sheet that will help you estimate your budget per person and let you track [...]
[...] husband and I pour/poor over the Christmas spreadsheet (yes, I do know how dorky that sounds, but we’re not the only ones!), figuring out who should give what to whom. We live at a distance from most of our family, so it [...]