Today is my kids’ (we have twins – boy & girl) 3rd birthday. As we celebrate the day, I want to take a moment away from all Excel stuff and share my experience being a dad. Grab a cup of coffee or whatever keeps you going, relax and read on.
The first shock
My first shock of being a dad arrived even before my kids were born. It was the first ultrasound scan Jo (my wife) went thru. The nurse announced,
I hear two heart-beats. Let me re-check
It would not be an understatement to say Jo and I skipped a few heart-beats hearing that! We never thought we would be blessed with twins. While we are doubly happy we also worried whether we can be good parents.
To top it, when they turned up we realized that we have one of each – Nakshatra (girl) and Nishanth entered our world on September 24th, 2009.
(Note: In India parents are not allowed to know the sex of baby before they were born, hence the surprise)
My 6 Daddy years…
A quick TODAY()-DATE(2009,9,24) tells you that it has been only 3 years since my kids were born. But I have amassed 6 daddy years, thanks to raising twins!
In these 6 years, there were a handful occasions when I felt like sending a classified ad to newspapers to this effect:
Take one or both. 2 lovely kids, well raised but naughty. Potty trained and can brush their teeth. Hurry up!
But better sense prevailed and we kept them 😀
To be honest, they are not all that mischievous. But sometimes they get on our nerves so bad.
A dinner to remember
After spending probably zillion nights eating at home, one day, my wife declared, “Honey, lets go out tonight.” We usually leave the kids with our in-laws (they live close by) when we do this. But that day we must have been possessed by cruel demons. Why else would I say, “Lets take the kids along!”
And all 4 of us got in to a car and went. We did a bit of shopping (getting new clothes for kids for their upcoming birthday) and reached the restaurant. Being weekend it was full. So I left Jo & kids at lobby and went inside to book a table.
Let me break this story at this point and give you one basic rule of parenting.
You need 100% attention of one adult per one children when they are in public places.
Coming back to the lobby, as I walked inside, suddenly Nishanth and Nakshatra felt liberated & started running like incredible hulk after breaking free from underground army prison. With in a span of 30 seconds, Nakshatra walked to a near-by mini pond and sat on the ledge. As Jo managed to lug Nishanth from the other corner to that pond, Nakshatra made a backward move with a swiftness rarely seen outside tom and jerry cartoons.
SPALSH!
She is drowned up side down and started crying aloud.
Thankfully, Jo quickly pulled her out. But now all her clothes are wet and she is shivering a lot.
Fortunately, we had new clothes in the car. So I took her to the car and changed. By the time I got back, Jo already got us seats and ordered something. So we started eating. And then, Nakshatra wanted to pee. So Jo took her to the rest-room. And then Nishanth started running behind them. So I followed him.
Meanwhile a clever waiter noticed an empty table with no food items. He promptly asked the next group to occupy it.
When all of us got back, we had 4 strangers looking hungrily at our order of chicken something, Indian breads & something else!
I will not bother you with how the rest of dinner, drive to dessert place and drive back home went. But rest assured that we had few more nasty surprises.
The car that wont start
My kids have taken a strange fancy to keys & key holes. Once every few weeks they invent a hare-brained scheme to spoil a lock, key or something. Once when visiting family friends, my son has managed to bend my car keys by 900. Fortunately they had a hammer and we could twist it back.
But we are not always so lucky. Recently, in one of their invented games, they poked small sticks in to the key hole my car. Later when I tried to open the door, it was jammed. I ended up calling the service center folks and they sent a technician who gave me the look, “Sucker! I am sure you will become a regular customer”.
This is not a one off thing. I had same experience with my bike key hole, car trunk key hole and our gate locks. And did I tell you my kids derive a lot of pleasure locking the doors when we are in bath?!?
But its not all that bad
If there is one thing I am doing more after my kids are born, it is laughing & smiling. We (Jo and I) laugh at least a dozen times everyday watching the kids. They make us immensely happy. It is a joy to watch them grow, take good care of each other and learn things. Their innocent smiles and immense curiosity put us at ease almost immediately even when we are tired, stressed or worried. And that is worth more than a jammed key hole or spoiled dinner.
I wish you many more years of happiness, health & wealth Nakshatra & Nishanth. Now go and have the cake.
Just don’t spoil your new clothes 😛
PS: If you have kids, Learn Excel. You will have more free time to chase those little lunatics.
23 Responses to “Shift Calendar Template – FREE Download”
Hi Chandoo,
your recent postings include only Excel 2007 templates. Unfortunately the company I work at still runs Excel 2003. Is it possible to get your awesome files in other excel version as well?
Thanks so much for your great excel stuff!
Is it possible to do this for shifts with hours instead of days? To organise a three shift day?
Thanks in advance,
Stelios
In my organization there are 45 employees i need split then into three shifts ex:A shift:14,B shift:14,C shift:14 and week off:3 kindly help me on this.
@Masthan
You need to understand what rules your company has for the various shifts / roster combinations
Chandoo, I once did a shift control spreadsheet for my team. I put one person in each line, the columns were the days. I put a shift code in each cell indicating in which shift that person should work, or if the person were out that day. I have two codes for being out. One is for vacations and one is to compensate days worked in weekends. This way I was able to count how many persons I have in each shift, how many were on vacations and how many were out compensating (that's the term we use here) weekend worked hours.
Later I included the possibility of a person be in two lines one for normal hours other for overtime. This is mainly used for planning purposes. If you would like I can send you an example. The only problem of this spreadsheet is that we don't have a person view, only this consolidated view.
Hi George, I would like to have a copy of your spreadsheet if you can share it.
Thanks in advance, Chuck
Hi Chandoo,
Where is the code located ? is it VBA ? If so , how do you hide it ? Or it is .NET ?
Thx
@Idan
.
No VBA or code, it is all done with Mirrors.
Only Joking,
.
But there is no VBA or code,
It is all done with Named Formulas and Lookups.
Have alook at the cells in the calander area and Named Formulas in the Formulas, Name Manager Tab.
How can i calculate between two or more different workbooks? Please, reply me as early as possible.
@Anand
Open the workbooks you want to link to
Start a formula = and click and change between workbooks as required.
You can use the View, Switch window menu to change workbooks mid formula
The format for using workbooks is
=[Workbook.xlsm]Sheet1!$A$1
or
=SUM('[Book2.xls]Sheet1'!$A$1:$D$10)
etc
Hi Chandoo,
I am working with a call centre wherein i ned to update at the month end 20 to 30 employees login hours which are defict to track it at the month end is very difficult is there any template which can be made to track that why on a particular day a guy who needs to be on calls was why not on calls.
Thank you so much Chandoo. This is really helping me. As usual, you rock.
What's FortyTwoDays and Calendar in Name manager?
Both are unused and FortyTwoDays doesn't make any sense.
I have a SQL db that contains records of events scheduled/completed on a particular date. Can this method ous building a calendar be used to display those events on the respective day?
Positively awesome!
I'm attempting to help a friend create a schedule for adult classes - and of course its not"paid help". Here is the scenario:
20 classes, instructor, room#, student class size, start date, number of class days (need to subtract weekends)
class
instructor
room
students
start
#days
PATH
karen
201
21
01/01/13
11
BILLING
jane
401
15
01/12/13
13
MEDISOFT
mike
301
11
01/25/13
9
he'd like to see these classes show up in different colors within the same month's calendar chart. He can draw it, but I'd like to see it done automatically through data, and I just can't visualize it, but I KNOW this will work - can you help?
Jan 🙂
Dear chandoo,
Try many way to download still can't access. Any way we want to try out 3 shifts with 3 guys in a group .eg Group A Morn, Group B Night and Group C Rest. And every each group must work on sunday to take turns. In fact we are security teams so that's why sunday is required to work. Pls guide and show how to put in the working calendar. Thank you in advance.
I've been trying to copy and/or recreate this to use in a workbook I'm doing for the transportation department I'm working for. I need to have the calendar on the first sheet in my document (it has graph's from data on another sheet). I'm trying to use it to track (with the conditional formatting) accidents and injuries. I've redone the conditional formatting to do 4 different accident types (no injury, near miss, OSHA recordable injury and work loss injury), but when I enter the formula's you have in the calendar portion where it says "DateOfFirst-FirstWeekDay" I can't figure out how you did that. Are you able to help?
I would like to use Excel to solve the following problem for a community work. I want to create a Driver schedule for a given month from a pool of volunteers for a community service. Each of these volunteers can drive only on specific days in a week. I would like to populate the driving schedule for each weekday with primary, secondary and tertiary drivers in a random fashion so that I do not overburden one person. I would greatly any help you can provide.
Hi chandoo,
Thanks for your valuable effort for create this template and let me know how to add multiple employees in the the Roaster.
Hi Chandoo,
This article on shift roaster is very helpful. Could you please let me know how i can use the same for n number of resources who work 24/7, considering their leaves and holidays?
Thanks,
Savitha
Hi Chandoo,
This article on shift roaster is very helpful to all. Could you please let me know how i can use the same if I want to add for some more shifts, since the color is not getting change if I add more shifts like 4,5 etc.,
Thanks,
Murali
nice post
How can I change the date to 2017 under Shift Data worksheet.