Discover these 15 extremely powerful excel formulas and save a ton of time next time you open that spreadsheet-2

Hello, hope you had a wonderful weekend and welcome to today's discussion. 

The news from major life-handlers and career coaches today is about the fact that the year is half spent and what have you achieved? A major career coach who i love and respect so much tagged one of his broadcast "6 months gone, 6 to go" and interpreting that in Excel's rows and columns, you can actually have a formula that will help you keep tab of the remaining days in the year without having to carry a calendar all along.

4. Days(360)

DAYS360 is our 4th formula and it calculates the number of days between two dates, based on a 360-day year. In cell A1 to C1, type the headers Today, Year-End and Left-Days and key into cells A2-B2 07/06/2015, 12/31/2015 but in cell C2, type in =DAYS360(A2,B2) which will give you 175 as shown below. Please note that the example below is in MM/DD/YYYY format, you can however change this to your preferred format by highlighting the A2-B2 and pressing ALT, O, E simultaneously, pick "Custom" and amend your date format to DD/MM/YYYY.

TODAY      YEAR-END   LEFT-DAYS
07/06/2015   12/31/2015        175

So that you don't have to change today's date everyday, you can replace the content of cell A2 with =today() and press enter. This function updates the cell with the current date any time you open the sheet. Why not try it out?

5. Find out current date, time with a snap (not snap drink please)

You have a list of customer debtors and you want to find out which ones are due for payment after today. The funny thing is you do this everyday. So instead of entering the date every single day you can use today()

Example: Use today() to get 07/06/2015 

Also try now() to get current time in date time format. Remember, you can always format these date and times to see them the way you like (for eg. July-05, July 05, 2015 instead of 07/05/2015)

6. Find out the data type of cell contents

This can be handy when you are working off the data that someone else has created. For example you may want to capitalize if the contents are text, make it 5 characters if its a number and leave it as it is otherwise for certain cell value. Type() does just that, it tells what type of data a cell is containing.

Example: Use TYPE("Obasanjo") to get 2  and TYPE("1000") to get 1 

7. Round a number to nearest even, odd number

When you are working with data that has fractions / decimals, often you may need to find the nearest integer, even or odd number to the given decimal number. Thankfully excel has the right function for this.

Example: Use ODD(65.4) to get 67

Also try even() to nearest even number and int() to round given fraction to integer just below it.

Example: Use EVEN(62.4) to get 64
Use INT(63.99) to get 63

If you need to round off a given fraction to nearest integer you can use round(63.55,0) to get 64.

Thank you for your time and have an "Excel-lent" week ahead. 

Oladapo Sorinola

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