All articles with 'date and time' Tag

Here is a simple but tricky problem. Imagine you are the HR manager of a teeny-tiny manufacturing company. As your company is small, you just have one employee in the shop floor. He is Mr. Billy. As this is a one person production facility, Billy has the flexibility to choose his working hours. At the […]

Time for another quick Excel tip.

Lets say the park near your house rents tennis courts by hour. And they charge $10 per hour. At the end of an intense tennis playing week, Linda, the tennis court manager called you up and said you need to pay $78 as rent for that week.

How many hours did you play?

Of course 78/10 = 7.8 hours.

But we all know that 7.8 hours makes no sense.

We also know that 7.8 hours is really 7 hours 48 minutes.

So how to convert 7.8 hrs to 7:48 ?

Today, lets learn how to make a simple timer app using Excel. First some background…,

Recently, I learned how to solve Rubik’s cube from my nephew. As a budding cuber, I wanted to track my progress. Initially I used the stopwatch in my iPhone. But it wont let me track previous times. So I thought, “Well, I can use Excel for this”.

So I made a small timer app using Excel. Its quite minimalistic. It has a single button. I press it and it tracks the start time (date & time stamp). If I press the button again, it records the duration.

This way, I can see my progress over next few weeks and may be plot the trend.

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2014 Excel Calendar & daily planner Template.

This calender has,

• One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
• Daily event planner & tracker
• 1 Mini calendar
• Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
• Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.

Here is a handy trick to calculate last day of any month.

Assuming y and m contain the year & month for which you want to find the last day’s date, write

=DATE(y, m+1,0)

That is right, you can use ZERO (0) as the day.

When you do this, Excel tells us the last day of previous month.

Today, let’s travel in time. Pack your photon ray guns, extra underwear, buckle your seat belts and open Excel!

Of course, we are not going to travel in time. (Come to think of it, we are going to travel in time. By the time you finish reading this, you would have traveled a few minutes)

We are going to learn how to travel in time when using Excel. In simple terms, you are going to learn how to move forward or backward in time using Excel formulas.

So are you ready to hit the warp speed? Let’s beam up our Excel time machine.

Lets say you have a list of employees and their birthdays. Now you want to sort this list, based on their birthday, not age. How would you do it?

Its Friday, that means time for another Excel challenge for you.

Calculate vacation days in a period:

Your mission, if you choose to accept it,

Step 1: Download the hom work problem file.

Step 2: Calculate number of vacations taken in a period. Specifically,

1) How many vacations are taken between start & end dates, assuming complete vacation should be inside the start & end date period?
2) How many vacations are taken such that at least one day of vacation is between start & end dates?
3) How many people took vacations? (if same person took multiple vacations, then count it as 1)

HR managers & department heads always ask, “So what is the vacation pattern of our employees? What is our average absent rate?”

Today lets tackle that question and learn how to create a dashboard to monitor employee vacations.

What do HR Managers need? (end user needs)

There are 2 aspects tracking vacations.

1. Data entry for vacations taken by employees
2. Status dashboard to summarize vacation data

Few weeks ago, someone asked me “What are the top 10 formulas?” That got me thinking.

While each of us have our own list of favorite, most frequently used formulas, there is no standard list of top 10 formulas for everyone. So, today let me attempt that.

If you want to become a data or business analyst then you must develop good understanding of Excel formulas & become fluent in them.

A good analyst should be familiar with below 10 formulas to begin with.

When planning a meeting, an event or activity, we deal with many individual steps (each taking certain amount of time). Today let us understand how to create an agenda template in Excel using simple formulas.

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2013 Excel Calendar Template.

This calender has,

• One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
• Daily event planner & tracker
• 1 Mini calendar
• Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
• Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.

When analyzing business data like sales, shop visits or productivity, one of the questions managers always ask is,

What is the best month / week for this data?

To answer this question, we need to make a chart that looks like above. Today, lets learn how to highlight portions of such charts that correspond to best week or best month.

Its Home work time folks. Sharpen your Excel pencils and get cracking.

Find out if 2 dates are in same month

Lets say you have 2 dates in A1, A2.

Q1. What formula tells us if both of them are in same month?

Both dates must be in same month & year!

Go ahead and post your answer in comments.

So who is up for a challenge? Can you use only formulas and extract dates buried inside text?

1. Download this file.
2. In column C, write a formula such that you can extract the date in column B
3. If you succeed, post your solution here as a comment.
4. If you fail, drink some coffee, start afresh.