User Defined Functions

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'User Defined Functions' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Automatically Converting to GMT
You know what time it is, right? (Quick—look at your watch.) What if you want to know what time it is in Greenwich, England? Now you need to know how to convert times from your locality to GMT. This tip shows you how.

Converting Between Buddhist and Gregorian Calendar Systems
Using the DATE function to convert a calendar system.

Counting Colors of Cells
Many people use colors of cells as a common method of communicating information in a worksheet. If you need a way to count cells that are formatted with a certain color, then the user-defined function in this tip will come in very handy.

Determining Combinations to Make a Total
If you have a range of cells that contain values, you may wonder which combinations of those cells should be used to meet a specific target total. This can be an interesting challenge, as described in this tip.

Generating Unique Sequential Numbers
Using Excel to generate unique sequential numbers for invoices or company statements.

Looking Up Names when Key Values are Identical
Need to look up some values based upon some key items that may be identical to each other? Depending on the characteristics of your data, you may need to look at your worksheets just a bit differently than before.

Modifying Proper Capitalization
The PROPER worksheet function is used to change the case of text so that the first letter of each word is capitalized. If there are some words you don't want to have an initial cap, then you'll want to use the ideas presented in this tip.

Returning a Weight and a Date
If you have two columns containing dates and weights from those dates, you may want to pick a date associated with a given weight. It's easy to do using just a few Excel worksheet functions.

Sorting by Fill Color
Sorting data in a worksheet is easy, unless you want to sort by the color used to fill a range of cells. There are ways to do the sorting, however, as illustrated in this tip.

Weekdays in a Month
Excel has no intrinsic formulas that allow you to determine how many of a particular weekday occur within a month. You can create such a formula, however, as described in this tip.