Out of the Hat Ltd

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admin — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:13:53 +0000

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Creating a Perpetual 12-month Calendar

admin — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 08:51:02 +0000

This spreadsheet was created at request of a site visitor. It shows how to create a 12-month calendar from just the year number. It’s not the finished article, just an example and a method, so you can have a go!

I suggest you have a look at the post on using Excel Dates, so that you understand what I’ve done any how it works.

Excel template containing the start point: Perpetual Calendar Workings

Excel Dates – Calculations and Functions

admin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 14:05:37 +0000

Dealing with dates in Excel is easier than you think.
For a start, dates are just numbers. The number 1 is 1 Jan 1900, 2 is 2 Jan 1900, and so on – we’re now over 40000. (In the help files and function descriptions, they are referred to as ‘serial numbers’). That means that you can add and subtract dates, or move along a calendar by adding to/subtracting from a date.
Secondly, if you want to know day of the week, month of the year, or even number of working days between two dates, there’s a function to do it. Excel has a whole range of date functions built in, to make your life easier.
And thirdly, the date you see is just the serial number, formatted in a particular way. If you want to see the day of the week, change the number formatting. If you only want to see the day number, change the number formatting…
In this tutorial, we perform a few date calculations and use some of the more common date functions to build a perpetual calendar in Excel – just enter the month and year, and it will display the day numbers in the familiar Sunday-Saturday calendar grid.
If you want to build a 12-month calendar from just the year, take a look here (assumes you understand the concepts described in the tutorial on this page).

Create a space between paragraphs

admin — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:02:28 +0000

One of the key skills in using Word is to manage white space on your page. Look at any magazine or newspaper article, advert, or other piece of printed text, and you’ll see that the white space helps you read it.
Often, there is a small amount of white space between each paragraph, which helps the reader separate these blocks of text, and thereby helps with understanding. May people achieve this by simply adding a blank line into their text, which has several negative effects, as well as only being one size (unless you go through the manual pain of resizing the font in that blank line!). This video shows you how to change the amount of white space for a single paragraph, and then shows you how to do it for every paragraph in your document.

Writing formulae between books – the easy way

admin — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:27:49 +0000

Trying to type out a formula that relates to a different book can be a nightmare – how do you get the file name, the exclamation mark, the apostrophes, etc, all in the right place? Well, why not let Excel do the hard work for you?

Writing formulae between sheets – the easy way

admin — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 10:15:55 +0000

Trying to type out a formula that relates to a different sheet can be a nightmare – how do you get the exclamation mark, the apostrophes, etc, all in the right place? Well, why not let Excel do the hard work for you?

An alternative to Radio Buttons

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 19:59:55 +0000

Radio buttons are a neat way to enable only one thing to be selected. The downside is that you need to add macros on the back end to make them work.

The tutorial below (recorded in Excel 2007, but 2003 options also explainded) offers you a way to use data validation to ensure that only one cell has data entered. It’s not quite as good as a radio button, because in order to change your selection you have to delete the original then insert the new, whereas radio buttons do that for you. But if that’s not a big overhead, then please consider this option over radio button macros.

The second part of the tutorial shows you how to set up conditional formatting so that the other selection turns grey once you’ve filled one in.

Leave a comment if you want to know how to do this for more than 2 cells, and I’ll record another tutorial to demonstrate.

Demo spreadsheet: not_radio_buttons.xls

Why don’t I like macros?

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:27:09 +0000

Actually, I do like macros, used in the right place at the right time. Excel macros can be incredibly powerful, but I try to avoid using them if possible. Why? Well, there are several reasons:

Undo – There are a few things that break the ‘undo’ chain, by which I mean that you can’t undo anything done before them. Guess what – running a macro falls into that category. And it doesn’t matter how good you are at Excel, being able to Undo is useful!
Audit trails – you can’t audit actions taken by a macro, unless you’ve written the macro to create its own audit trail. Once run, things have changed on your workbook, and there’s no evidence as to why. Which means trying to work out why that key result looks odd is very difficult!
Time – unless you’re a whizz with Visual Basic (the language of macros), anything but the simplest recorded keystrokes take a while to work out.

Having said all that, there’s a time and a place. Yes, I’ve used macros, and yes, they save you time if used correctly. If you want to start using macros in anger, why not take a look at our suggested starter book.

Starting with Excel VBA – Book Suggestion

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 10:33:08 +0000

When I first started learing Excel Visual Basic, I needed a book to guide me through the basics. I found ‘Excel VBA Programming for Dummies’ met that requirement perfectly. I recommend this book if you need a starter in Excel VBA.

Click the link on the right to buy from Amazon UK – there’s a full description and an opportunity to look inside the book.

Data Validation Lists on a separate sheet

admin — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:40:28 +0000

This tutorial shows you how to apply data validation using a list on a different sheet. It assumes you already know how to use data validation.