Discover these 15 extremely powerful excel formulas and save a ton of time next time you open that spreadsheet-3

Hello Excel-lent,

Trust your day has been good. Please let us continue from were we stopped on Monday.  

8. Generate random number between any 2 given numbers

When you need a random number between any two numbers, try randbetween(), it is very useful in cases where you may need random numbers to simulate some behavior in your spreadsheets as shown below. If you continue pressing F9 on your worksheet, it is possible that you get 30,000.

9. What is this week’s number in the current year ?

Often you may need to find out if the current week is 25th week of this year. This is not so difficult to find as it may seem. Again, excel has the right function to do just that.  Example: Use WEEKNUM(TODAY()) will get 28 or =WEEKDAY(TODAY()) to get you 4 as the fourth day in the week. This can be used by MIS staff or key Excel users who administer reports on daily or weekly basis. i.e Stockbrokers, Insurance or Pension personnel.

10. Find out what is the date after 30 working days from today ?

Finding out a future date after 30 days from today is easy, just change the month. But what if you need to know the date thirty working days from now. Don’t use your fingers to do that counting, save them for typing a comment here and use the workday() excel function instead.  

Example: Use WORKDAY(TODAY(),30) tells that Wednesday, August 19, 2015 is 30 working days away from today. Try it! In the example below, the DAYS (sub of DAYS360 function) that we discussed earlier was used to get the Payment Overdue number of Days. This is a simple table you can adopt to manage just just receivables but deliverable from people as well. i.e Expect a feedback from colleagues of followups on Project Management. 

11. With so many functions, how to handle errors

Once you get to the powerful domain of excel functions to simplify your work, you are bound to have incorrect data, missing cells etc. that can make your formulas go kaput. If only there is a way to find out when a formula throws up error, you can handle it. Well, you know what, there is a way to find out if a cell has an error or a proper value. iserror() MS Excel function tells you when a cell has error.

Example: Use ISERROR(60/0) returns TRUE since 60 divided by zero throws divide by zero error.

Also try ISNA() to find out if a cell has NA error (Not applicable). Give these functions a try, simplify your work, enjoy and be Excel-lent 

Oladapo Sorinola 

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