One of my Excel School students, Rajatha, e-mailed me and asked,
I have to come up with a Birthday and Anniversary calender which would automatically send emails on the particular date, is this possible if yes then how?
My initial response was,
You can do the automated birthday / anniversary reminder using excel. Here is the basic approach:
- Record birthdays and anniversaries in a table
- Now, write a simple macro to scan the list to see which birthdays / anniversaries are on today
- For each of the matches, send an email with a pre-composed message (more on sending emails thru vba here: http://www.rondebruin.nl/sendmail.htm )
To which she came back and said,
I am not familiar with macros… is there any other way?
Well, there is.
You can use Excel to remind you about upcoming birthdays and create pre-composed messages, like above. The basic approach is like this:
- We list all the birthdays, corresponding names and email addresses in a list.
- Now, using TODAY() and IF() formulas we test if anyone’s birthday is today.
- If that is the case, we use Excel’s HYPERLINK() formula to generate a mailto hyperlink.
- Once you click on that, Excel opens your mail application (outlook or notes or whatever fancy app you are using) and loads the message.
- You just press the send button. Done!
Watch Excel Birthday Reminder – Recipe Video
Download Excel Birthday Reminder Template
Click here to download the excel birthday reminder template & play with it.
Do you use excel to keep track of birthdays etc?
Not me. I have very few close friends and I remember their birthdays. For the rest, I use facebook to get notified when their birthday is around the corner. It is unlikely that I will forget the birthdays of family members.
But, I think Excel has amazing potential to remind you about various important dates. Especially if you want to send birthday wishes to customers (or employees) from a database, Excel is good for that.
What do you think? Please share your experience & tips with us using comments. I am all ears.
Download even more templates:
Visit excel templates page to download several spreadsheet solutions & samples.
11 Responses to “Use Alt+Enter to get multiple lines in a cell [spreadcheats]”
@Chandoo:
One more useful trick.......
In a column you have no. of data in rows and need to copy in the next row from the previous row, no need to go for the previous rows but entering Alt + down arrow, you will get the list of data, (in asending order), entered in the previous rows...
This is another great tip. I use this all the time to make sense of some *very* long formulas. As soon as the formula is debugged I remove the break.
Great tip Chandoo!
I use this feature often and it has even gotten the, "how did you do that" response.
Thanks!
@Ketan: Alt+down arrow is an awesome tip. I never knew it and now I am using it everyday.
@Jorge, Tony: Agree... 🙂
[...] Day 1: Insert Line Breaks in a Cell [...]
how can we merge a two sheet.
excellent idea. Chandoo you are genious
Hi chandoo,
I have used ctrl+enter to break the cell. But I did not get the result.
Please tell me how can i break the cell in multiple lines.
Hi, Ranveer,
Its not Ctrl+enter to break the cell, use Alt+Enter to make it happen.
hi Chandoo....
how we can use Alt+Enter in multiple rows at the same time please reply hurry i have lot of work and have no time and i m stuck in this. 🙁
Alt+J worked once 🙁
So I found another more reliable way:
=SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(13),"")
Where A2 is the cell that contains the line breaks which the code for it is CHAR(13). It will replace it with whatever inside the ""