@Jeff S said:
@Manni said:I wish I could post a screenshot of this to back up my story.
Every year someone in my company makes up a calendar for that year to show business holidays, special corporate events, etc etc. They create this calendar in Excel, for reasons I still have yet to understand. The days of the month are laid out as if you were looking at a normal calendar, 7 days in a 1-week row; all the months are organized into three columns, four rows. I bring this up because I'm not sure of any Excel auto-formatting options that can produce this layout.
It's not so bad to spend a couple hours every year making this cell-shaded, neatly-formatted calendar. The problem comes in when I noticed the formulas. For the first day of each month, it's just a "1" in that cell. The next day is "= A1 + 1". The next day is "= B1 + 1". Yep, they're just incrementing the value of the previous day's cell. Instead of typing 1, 2, 3 for the dates, they're entering the first day of each month, and 353 formulas to increment those values.
And before you argue that Excel has some copy-n-paste features that will update the formulas for you, the format of the formula changes intermittently throughout the document from "= Cell + 1" to "=+Cell + 1" to "= 1 + Cell". Nope, this was all done by hand.
That's actually a clever idea, not a WTF. Suppose you have your Excel calendar template created, and you do exactly what you said they did -- each formula is the value of the previous day's cell +1. Now, for Januray, the first day of the month, is say, Monday. You put 1 in Monday on the first row, and bam! -- the calendar is updated. you just delete the contents of the cells for days >31 and before the 1st, SAVE AS "january.xls" and off you go. Next month, you go back to the template, maybe the first day is Thursday, pop a 1 in that cell, and your calendar is updated instantly again.
Otherwise, every time you create a new month. you go into *every* cell and type in 2,3,4,5,..31 (or drag and use autofill, but you get the idea). The formula saves you from this work.
So, I don't see why anyone would complain about this or spend too much time worrying about it, to be honest. The result comes out fine, and for the person maintaining the calendar, it saves a little bit of work, and at the very least it prevents potential "typos" that might occur if you have to type in 1...31 each month over and over.
Jeff, I don't think you understand what was stated. While yes, if this calendar was done on a month to month basis... doind something like this might save some time. However, this calendar is made for all 12 months listed in 3 columns and 4 rows. It just doesn't quite work that nicely this way. The way it is/was implemented is indeed a WTF.