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.
12 Responses to “Analyzing Search Keywords using Excel : Array Formulas in Real Life”
Very interesting Chandoo, as always. Personally I find endless uses for formulae such as {=sum(if(B$2:B$5=$A2,$C$2$C$5))}, just the flexibility in absolute and relative relative referencing and multiple conditions gives it the edge over dsum and others methods.
I've added to my blog a piece on SQL in VBA that I think might be of interest to you http://aviatormonkey.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/lesson-one-sql-in-vba/ . It's a bit techie, but I think you might like it.
Keep up the good work, aviatormonkey
Hi Chandoo,
You might find this coded solution I posted on a forum interesting.
http://www.excelforum.com/excel-programming/680810-create-tag-cloud-in-vba-possible.html
[...] under certain circumstances. One of the tips involved arranging search keywords in excel using Array Forumlas. Basically, if you need to know how frequent a word or group of keywords appear, you can use this [...]
@Aviatormonkey: Thanks for sharing the url. I found it a bit technical.. but very interesting.
@Andy: Looks like Jarad, the person who emailed me this problem has posted the same in excelforum too. Very good solution btw...
Realy great article
"You can take this basic model and extend it to include parameters like number of searches each key phrase has, how long the users stay on the site etc. to enhance the way tag cloud is generated and colored."
How would you go about doing this? I think it would need some VB
Hi,
I found the usage very interesting, but is giving me hard time because the LENs formula that use ranges are not considering the full range, in other words, the LEN formula is only bringing results from the respective "line" cell.
Using the example, when I place the formula to calculate the frequency for "windows" brings me only 1 result, not 11 as displayed in the example. It seems that the LEN formula using ranges is considering the respective line within the range, not the full range.
Any hint?
@Thiago
You have to enter the formula as an Array Formula
Enter the Formula and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter
Not just Enter
Thank you, Hui! I couldn't work out how this didn't work
is there a limit to the number of lines it can analyse.
Ie i am trying to get this to work on a list of sentances 1500 long.
@Gary
In Excel 2010/2013 Excel is only limited by available memory,
So just give it a go
As always try on a copy of the file first if you have any doubts
Apologies if I am missing something, but coudn't getting frequency be easier with Countif formula. Something like this - COUNTIF(Range with text,"*"&_cell with keyword_&"*")
Apologies if I missed, but what is the Array Formula to:
1. Analyze a list of URL's or a list of word phrases to understand frequency;
2. List in a nearby column from most used words to least used words;
3. Next to the list of words the count of occurrences.