Here is a familiar problem:
You create a workbook to track some data. You ask your staff to fill up the data. Almost all the input data is fine, except the date column. Every one types dates in their own format.
Here is a fun, simple & powerful way to warn your users when they enter wrong dates.
Use conditional formatting
Here is a quick demo:
How to ensure cleaner dates with conditional formatting?
- Let’s say your users need to enter date input in cell C3.
- Select C3 and go to Home > Conditional Formatting > New Rule
- Select the rule type as “Use a formula…”
- Use a formula like this: =ISERROR(DAY($C$3))
- Set up formatting to highlight incorrect dates
- Done
Explanation for the formula:
We will assume that C3 contains a valid date and try to do some sort of date operation on it, like finding the day of month using DAY($C$3). If this returns an error, that means we have an invalid date.
So to check the error status, we use ISERROR().
A caveat: dates are numbers
Since Excel dates are numbers, technically, your users can type a number in C3 (like 7) and our conditional formatting won’t trigger the error.
Bonus tip: Adding conditional formatting to an entire column
To add conditional formatting to an entire column,
- Let’s say the date inputs go to column C, starting with C3 as first input
- Select all the cells in column C that will have dates
- Set up the conditional formatting with below rule:
- =ISERROR(DAY($C3))
Download example workbook
Click here to download a simple example workbook with this technique. Examine the conditional formatting in C3 & D3 to learn more.
Do you use CF to nudge your users in right direction?
Excel Conditional Formatting is one of my all time favourite features. I use liberal amounts of CF on all my Excel recipes. I think CF makes a great ingredient if you are collecting user inputs.
What about you? Do you use conditional formatting to make sure your inputs are clean? What techniques do you use? Please share your thoughts and tips in the comments area.
Here are few more awesome ways to use conditional formatting:
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.