New Product: Holiday Shopping Budget

A small interlude from the standard Excel tips. I just put out a new product on Etsy today, and I think it's a great one for the holidays! It's a quick, and easy to use Holiday Budget & Shopping List.


How does it work? Once you've purchased it, you'll get it in your inbox within about 24 hours. Upon receipt, you'll see a place to add up to 8 people to shop for, with 6 gifts each (need more? Send me an email and I'd be happy to customize it). Fill in the gifts, and how much you want to spend, and you'll quickly see what you can expect to be your total Holiday Spending. Then as you shop, you can come back and fill in the amount you actually spent, so you can see how much you have left for little Joey in case you went over on Grandpa's budget.

Create a formula to always display today's date

Developing invoices? Just want to keep track of when you printed a page out? There are many reasons one could need today's Date, Time, or some variation to always be present on the spreadsheet.

Today we'll cover how to do that, using the formula =now()

If you type the formula =now() into a blank cell, it will display just that. It will show you the date, and the time.

You can modify this in many different ways. If you edit the cells formatting preferences (right click -> format -> number tab) you can make the date and time look however you want.

Another trick is to use the =text() function. This function allows you to convert any number into text of your choosing (date/time is a number in excel, you just typically don't see it that way)

the format is =text(dateTime,formatStyle).

for dateTime, I'd just put in the formula =now(), so it looks like:

=text(now(),formatStyle)

To see your different options for "format style' I recommend right clicking on a cell, clicking "format cell", going to "number" and selecting the custom type. You will see lots of formatting codes (and can test them right in the window) to figure out what you need. Once you've figured out the code you want, replace formatStyle with it.

=text(now(),"MMYYDDD") would make that cell today show "08232008". If I put in:
=text(now(),"MMMM") it would just show "August".

I think this function can have lots of uses, so have at it!