Lets celebrate these holidays in PHD Style. By learning few excel formulas that you can use to find out dates for some of the popular public holidays like – labor day, memorial day etc.
When is Labor Day (US) in 2010?
Labor day (the US variant) is celebrated on first Monday of every September. It occurs on Sep 6th in 2010.
Using excel date formulas, you can easily find out the labor day’s date for any given year.
Here is the formula I have used:
How this formula works?
The formula finds the weekday of first of September (WEEKDAY(DATE(2010,9,1))) and then uses this information to return one of the possible dates for first Monday.
You can use similar logic to find dates for other holidays like Thanksgiving day (both US and Canada), Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Day.
Is there a long weekend for New Years Day in 2011?
You can use excel to answer questions like whether there will be a long weekend for a given holiday. A long weekend occurs when the holiday is on either Thursday or Monday. So for example, you can check the long weekend condition for January 1st, 2011 like this:
How this formula works?
That is your homework. Go figure!
Download Example Worksheet and Learn by Playing with the Formulas
I have prepared a simple worksheet with 8 examples to calculate the dates for Thanksgiving dates, New years Day of Week, Martin Luther King Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Indian variants of Independence and Republic Days. Go ahead and download the example workbook and play with it.
Related Material:
Help on formulas used in this tutorial: WEEKDAY Formula | IF Formula | OR Formula | 75 Excel Formulas – My eBook.
More examples and tutorials on Excel Date Formulas and Features.
11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.