If you need to derive the previous month from a known date, use this formula:
=DATE(YEAR(A1);MONTH(A1)-1;1)
This works in OpenOffice (and LibreOffice), which do not seem to have a native function to do the job, and should work in MS Office Excel as well.
Back in the good old days, I am pretty sure, all the PST related stuff was in the normal file menu. Not anymore. I wanted to create a new PST file and I had to look quite a while before I found it – Microsoft has it hidden quite well:
It’s in the Home ribbon, under “New Items -> More Items -> Outlook Data File”.
I never liked those Ribbons, but anyway, maybe this will save someone else ten minutes.
I was trying to set up a simple time sheet in Excel. I know that ready-made ones exist, but it’s more fun and educating to make your own, right? And I came across a nasty problem: Excel doesn’t like to display negative time:
Turns out there’s a simple solution for this: Enable the 1904 dating system. There is also a workaround formatting the result as text, but Microsoft states that this then can not be used for further calculations – not a viable solution for a time sheet!
To enable the 1904 dating system, go to your Excel options. It can be found under “Advanced” – you need to scroll quite a bit down:
Enable the option, and lo and behold – it works:
It’s the small things, sometimes – something I never needed to do in my old jobs is calculating with time. One very simple task is to just add up a set of times – Excel will “wrap around” at 24h:
There’s a simple solutions for this problem. Just surround your hours with square brackets when formatting the cell, like so:
Works like a charm:
25h not 1h
🙂
Looking for a way to easily and automatically create timelines, I came across an awesome post by Jon Witwer: How to Create a Timeline in Excel.
It’s not exactly the same in OpenOffice, but it works too (I tested it with LibreOffice, actually).