Creating a spreadsheet is a creative act. The choices made about data, formulas, layout and colour all contribute to communicating clearly. Communicating clearly and well is, in my book a creative process.
So, I thought I’d walk through my process in designing a spreadsheet to take information from what is essentially a database layout:
Into this view, a classic calendar view of the same information:
I’m planning to use the calendar view to share a social media posting schedule, as the people I’m sharing with aren’t Excel savvy (and why should they be?). I create the posting schedule in Excel, because I can easily save it in .csv format and upload it to Google Calendar. However, sharing the Google Calendar has drawbacks too, and it is simpler to print out a weekly calendar showing the planned posts.
When I began this process, I had some things sketched out in my mind. I wanted to enter a date and see the week around it. I always want to see the posts for the date in the context of the posts for the days around it. I also want a consistent layout of days – Sunday to Monday. Having the starting day of the week change each time would make it harder for my viewers.
That means I’m going to need to dynamically generate the dates based on the day of the week of my starting date. You can see my first pass below:
I labelled cell A1 WeekStart, this will help me remember the purpose of the contents of cell A1.
I’ve labelled the days of the week, and above them in row 2, given each day a number 1-7. The day numbers relate to the way the WEEKDAY function works. I’ll be using the mode where the week starts numbering 1 on Sunday. Later I’ll hide that row, but for now having it visible is helpful.
You can see that I’m stepping out the formula in rows 4 – 6. When I’m designing a spreadsheet, I’ll often step formulas out like this. It helps me avoid errors and makes each step clear. Later I’ll consolidate the steps.
In row 4, I’m calculating the following:
=(WEEKDAY(WeekStart,1))-B$2.
You can think of it as a way to calculate the number of days (+/-) from my start date. By the way, I chose to start with May 1, because it was on a Wednesday. That made sure I could test my formulas well, a Saturday or Sunday starting day would make testing harder.
Once I know I can count backwards and forwards from my starting date, I use the following formula:
=WeekStart-((WEEKDAY(WeekStart,1))-B$2)
The WEEKDAY function calculates the day number of the week. Here, it returns the number 4(Wednesday).
From the number 4 I subtract the value in row 2. This gives me the number of days to subtract from the WeekStart value. You can see the results in rows 5 and 6. Row 5 is simply the unformatted date value, since sometime I find visualizing the pure number easier.
This turned out to be a 5 part series! I hope you’ll find the next 4 parts interesting.
I’ll continue with the design process in my next post.
I offer Excel template design services and training. Feel free to send me an email – catharine@mytechgenie.ca
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