This week they celebrated Thanksgiving in the USA. Some people were thankful for Excel and its wonderful features. Others, not so thankful.
And apparently I’m not the only person who uses Excel for holiday meal planning. This might put a positive spin on pie charts! Mmmm…pumpkin pie.
Battles With Excel

omg. how did they get Excel to [...]

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I like to use Notepad to make notes as I work. In July, I described how I type .LOG at the top of the Notepad file, so the date and time are automatically entered when the file opens.
That’s a handy feature, but I wanted to timestamp the files as I was working to, to record [...]

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If you’re busy getting ready for a big family dinner today, you might find the dinner planner in this Excel workbook helpful.
You can enter your target dinner hour, and a list of food to prepare, and the planner calculates the start time for each item. I use it for our family dinners, and it’s a [...]

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I noticed that Bits du Jour was offering a 70% discount on "Excel 2007 Ribbon to old Excel Classic Menu Toolbar" this Thursday, so I decided to download the trial version and take a look. Maybe it’s something that would help people make an easier transition to Excel 2007, and at the discounted price of [...]

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About a week ago, John Walkenbach had a clearance sale for his PUP Add-In for Excel. PUP stands for Power Utility Pak, and that’s not an overstatement. I’ve been using the latest version, PUPv7 for Excel 2007, for the past week, and am amazed by all its features.
When installed, PUPv7 adds a tab to the [...]

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There are sites that offer Christmas Planner templates, usually in pdf format, which you can download and print. Then, store the printed sheets in a binder, and write out your task list, holiday budget, gift list and calendar.
I’m sure that helps people who are trying to organize a hectic holiday season, but Excel would [...]

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Answer: Dresses, molasses, puppies and beer. Question: What does Excel make us think of?
And I can relate to that “You cannot quit Microsoft Excel” error, since I got it this week too, while using Excel over a Citrix server. The only way you can quit Excel is to disconnect from the server, wait 30 minutes, [...]

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Recently I helped someone who was having trouble entering data in a new installation of Excel 2007. When he entered 100, the value was automatically changed to 1. If he typed 1000, the value immediately became 10. Very mysterious, and frustrating for the user.
It’s a Feature
What the user had discovered was a relatively unknown feature [...]

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In yesterday’s post I showed formulas you can use to pull information from a date in Excel. In some workbooks you’ll enter dates manually, but often you’d like a date to be calculated automatically.
Calculate the Current Date
To show the current date in a cell, use the TODAY function:
  =TODAY()
This date will update automatically when you [...]

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This week I’ve been working on date formulas, from very simple ones, to complex formulas that calculate workdays per month, based on start and end dates that can span several months.
Extract Information from a Date
Many times I need to pull a bit of information from a date, such as the year, month or weekday.

Here are [...]

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