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.
Blog
-
Excel: Calculating days, months, and years
-
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 the many ways in which we pass on our joint knowledge of who we are as people. This week, I’d like to share some of my traditions.
(more…) -
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 (
(more…)extensionAttribute6, in case you were wondering). -
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 averages for both ALPHA and BRAVO.
(more…) -
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 unique codes.
(more…) -
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.
(more…) -
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 have another set which represents the actual change. I wanted to show not only these in relation to each other, but also the relative difference as it changes over time.
(more…) -
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.
(more…) -
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:
(more…) -
PowerShell: Find many users using their name
Last week, I showed you how I looked up a single user in Active Directory, using the
(more…)Get-ADUsercmdlet. I noted that I had an issue with finding some users due to spelling errors. This wasn’t a problem when I was doing them individually, but I soon found myself needing to do the same for more than a hundred users. -
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
(more…)Get-ADUsercmdlet when combined with the-Filterparameter. Here’s what my first stab at the problem looked like this: