Thoughts on many things
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Excel: Calculating days, months, and years
One thing I find myself needing to do on a relatively regular basis, is calculate the number of days, months, or years between two given dates. Like with so many other things, Excel has a function for this, too. It’s intuitively named DATEDIF, and here’s how you use it. The syntax is =DATEDIF(startdate,enddate,UNIT). The units…
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Tradition!
In the opening act of Fiddler on the roof, Tevye and the other characters sing about the importance of tradition in their daily lives. While more than a hundred years have gone by since its setting in 1905, tradition remains important. It’s important to all of us, for so many reasons. Traditions are one of…
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PowerShell: Looking up specific user properties
Many of my customers use specific properties for various things. Most users do not have ADUC installed, and some of our customers even disallow installation of ADUC on end user computers. I recently had a user ask about looking up the contents of a specific attribute (extensionAttribute6, in case you were wondering). Luckily, this –…
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Excel: Find average based on multiple criteria
Last week, I showed you how to find an average based on a single criterion. That works well enough, but what if you want to find an average based on multiple criteria? In that case, the AVERAGEIF-function will fall short. In its place, you must use the AVERAGEIFS-function. This time, we want to find the…
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Excel: Finding averages based on a specified criterion
One of the many things I do in my capacity as a union representative is to assemble my own statistics based on raw numbers I get from my employer. One of the stats I calculate is the average pay in each section. As you might remember, last week I assembled a list of forty seven…
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Excel: Finding unique values
In complex datasets, finding the unique values can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. While you can often simply remove duplicates, if you intend to create a lookup-table, that isn’t an option, and you need to do it differently. Enter the UNIQUE-function. For this example, assume that you want all unique entries in column…
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Excel: Adding multiple axes in a chart
One of the many things I do as a union representative, is negotiate wages with management. I argue my point using a number of tools, not least of which is the change in pay over time. I have one set of data which is what we use when negotiating, which represents the estimated change. I…
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Excel: Visualising pay differences
As I’ve mentioned more than once previously, I’m a union representative. Among my many duties in this role is wage negotiations. While we negotiate collectively, I also make sure to dive into the numbers to look for the unexplained outliers, and to have them addressed. One of the tools I use to do this is…
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More recruitment spamming
As much as I maintain that showing the world how these spammy folks operate, they still keep trying. Here’s another example which is a mixed bag of good and bad: The first red flag here is the generic and bland text. I’m sure this works on some people, but I’ve seen similar crap before. The…
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PowerShell: Find many users using their name
This time around, I take the basis that I created last week, add a way to catch any users that is not found, as well as a way to run it on multiple users.
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PowerShell: Find User based on partial name
Some time ago, I needed to look up the account names of a handful of users in Active Directory. The information I had beforehand was their names. I did not have ADUC available to me, but I did have PowerShell. This is an excellent use case for the Get-ADUser cmdlet when combined with the -Filter…