First let me tell you that my trip to Maldives has been very successful. I had fun teaching excel, playing in the beach and relaxing. Both Jo and my son also loved the place (we left our daughter in India with my in-laws 🙁 ). We came back on Sunday by noon, Indian time and have slept most of the time since. I am planning to write a detailed travelogue and share my experience of running an Excel workshop. But that will happen only Friday.
Since I have too much backlog work, I am going to use this week for some of the guest posts that are pending for a while.
Excel Holiday Request Form
Theodor, one of our readers, first emailed me in December asking a question. But he also made a promise to share some of his techniques with us thru Guest posts. Naturally, I was too happy and invited him to share a file or two so that I can use them for articles here.
Later during Christmas holidays, he sent me this beautiful Holiday Request Form made using Excel.
What does Holiday Request Form do?
Using this form, employees can request for a holiday (leave / vacation). In Theodor’s words,
As promised, here’s a sample of something just finished – a holiday request form.
Nothing too fancy about it except one thing: because we’ve had repeated hassle with people messing up the date format when entering the “from…. until” dates and as a consequence the =NETWORKDAYS() formula would not work, I locked the cells and allowed them to change the dates via scroll-bars.
And then just to ramp it up a notch, the “calendar” at the bottom would be filled in with an “x” for each day requested. Now that’s a formula that bugged me for a few hours, since it has to do with a number of conditions that are apparently conflicting.
How does it work?
Theodor used various techniques and ideas of Excel that we frequently talk about in Chandoo.org. Some of the most important pieces of the puzzle are,
- Scroll-bar form control is used to select dates
- Conditional formatting is used to show x marks for dates on vacation
- NETWORKDAYS() formula is used to calculate vacation duration (while excluding weekends and national holidays) [more on this formula]
I tried to take some screen-shots of his file, but since the layout is big, the images would not come right. So I made a video (5 min) demonstrating the file. Please watch it to understand how this holiday request form works.
Download Holiday Request Form:
Click here to download the excel workbook. The file is protected with blank password. Unlock it to inspect the formulas and formatting rules.
Thank you Theodor
Thanks to Theodor for teaching me how to link things like conditional formatting, form controls and formulas to create simple yet awesome templates for keeping track of holiday requests etc.
If you like the template, please say thanks to Theodor.
Also, please share ideas and tips on how you would enhance this file.
2 Responses to “Weighted Sorting in Excel ”
Just add a column calculating the "performance" or whatever is your criteria and sort by it? No?
have no patience to waste 13min. Save your time too.
Just thought I would mention, the "weird" custom sort behavior mentioned at 5:45 where "% return" doesn't appear to be sorting is because the "August Purchases" field has the sort preference and since these are such unique values, no additional sorting is possible on the "% return" field. If there were two entries that had the same "Customer Since" year AND the same "August Purchases" amount, THEN you would see a sorting of the "% return" on these two entries.