Contextures News 20200616

Excel Milestone Days

June 16, 2020

Choose names to assign, Excel milestones, and more, in this week's Excel news. Visit my Excel website for more tips, tutorials and videos, and check the index for past issues of this newsletter.

You'll get my next newsletter on June 30th -- we're on the summer schedule now, with a newsletter every 2 weeks.

• Day 44000
• Choose Names
• Excel Articles
• Weekly Photo

Note: For some products mentioned below, I earn a commission on sales. That helps support the free tutorials on my site.

Day 44000

Long ago, on July 6, 2009, I was entering dates in Excel, and noticed that the current date had the number value of 40000. (In Excel's default date system, day 1 is on Jan 1, 1900)

That seemed like quite a milestone, so I wrote a blog post about it. Now, almost 4000 more days have passed, and this Thursday, June 18, 2020, is day 44000 in the Excel date system. Except on a Mac -- its day 0 is Jan 1, 1904. Exciting, right? ;-)

You'll be able to read my Excel Day 44000 blog post on Thursday (the link won't work until then.) And in the meantime, you can see more date calculations on my Contextures site.

Choose Names

There's a Golf Tee Off Times workbook on my Contextures site, in which you

• select a starting time from a drop down list
• mark 4 names with an X
• click a button to assign those players to the daily schedule

After a name is selected, conditional formatting shades that row, and INDEX/MATCH formulas show the tee off time for that player.

I'm sure you could adapt this technique to assign people to other types of schedules. Who's working each day of the week? Which employees are on the morning shift?

Go to my Contextures site, to watch a short video that shows how the tee off times file works. There are written steps too, and download the sample file.

Excel Articles

Here are a few Excel-related articles that you might find useful or interesting.

Power BI -- Sign up for the free Power BI Global Virtual Conference, that runs today and tomorrow (Tue Jun 16-17, 2020) from 1 - 9 PM EDT, both days. You'll have to register (free) to see the full agenda, including a few Power Query sessions. Sorry for the short notice! (Level - Int/Adv)

Charts: Instead of a crowded line chart, use one of these alternatives from Robert Mundigl - a band chart (no VBA) or an interactive chart that highlights one line.. (Level - Int/Adv)

Also see: My Excel Products || Previous Issues

Tumbling Tom

Our garden isn't too big this year, but it looks like we'll get a good harvest from one of our tomato plants -- Tumbling Tom. This is a determinate tomato plant, so it's bushy in shape, and has an early crop. We've never had this type of tomato plant before, but so far, so good!

NOTE: To read this newsletter online, paste this URL into your web browser: https://www.contextures.com/newsletter/excelnews2020/20200616ctx.html
I'll also post any article updates or corrections there.

That's it for this week! If you have any comments or questions, send me an email.

Debra Dalgleish
dsd@ contextures.com

P.S. You can choose the full Contextures news package (news and occasional special announcements), or basic news package (news only). Click either link to change your option.