Making Life Easier - simple Excel Formulas

You can save yourself a lot of time and boring effort by adding simple formulas to your spreadsheets.

Suppose you use a time sheet for keeping a record of your daily activities. Down one column is each date of the month and in the next column is the day. One way of achieving this is to laboriously enter each date and and day by typing it into the cells. Another way is to fill the date column using 'auto-fill', but you would still need to enter the day of the week individually.

However there is an easier way that takes a few seconds. Once you have entered the correct formulas all you need to do is complete the first day of the month (i.e. 01/04/08) in the top cell and the formulas do the rest.

The formula you use for the date column is +1 and the formula for the day column is =TEXT(B2,DDD) assuming B2 is the 1st date of the month.

I have prepared a spreadsheet showing this. If you click on the link at the side of this article for Google Docs this will take you to my sample spreadsheet. Scroll down to the bottom of the sheet and click on 'edit this page'. By clicking on the 'File' menu you have an option to export the file. Export it as a 'xls' file to your Excel spreadsheets on your computer. You can then click on the cells to see the formulas.

You can change the date in the first date of the month cell and see all the changes happen as if by magic!!

If you have any problems with Google Docs please email me at admin@margaretgammons.co.uk or add a comment below and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.