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- August 17, 2011
2011 Academic School Year Calendar
August 17, 2011Read more
Recently a reader commented that making a version of the compact calendar for the academic year would be quite handy. While it’s possible to modify the existing calendar, I recognized the value of having a ready-to-go version for harried teachers. The new Excel and PDF versions are designed for the United States academic year, which starts roughly around Labor Day. As a bonus, I’ve added a few new features.
What’s New?
Requires Excel 2007 or higher – I’ve upped the requirement from Excel 1997 (over 14 years old) to Excel 2007. This allows me to use a nicer version of the shading in the corners, and I can start using some decent-looking color schemes. The Excel 1997 colors are really ugly.
Arbitrary Starting Day – I’ve updated all the formulas to accept any starting date instead of assuming that the calendar starts on January 1. Note that the calendar will always shows the week before the actual starting day, just to be on the safe side.
New Month Separators – Earlier this year, Daniel Kinal of Melbourne, Australia sent me a modification of the Compact Calendar that had a nice way of doing month separation lines. I hadn’t realized that the formula for this would be quite so elegant…score!!!
Improved PDF Design – I tweaked the raw Excel output to use the official Dave Seah font, Proxima Nova Condensed, and manually-added the key holiday names. I really like the way it looks.
Download Academic School Year Calendar
Go grab it from the new Academic Compact Calendar Page, in the Productivity Tools section of the site.
Enjoy!
- August 16, 2011
2011 Resource/Time Tracker Updates
August 16, 2011Read more
The Resource/Time Trackers, AKA Resource Scheduler and Task Quantizer, are designed to track multiple projects using a clipboard.
After my initial tests, I thought it was too cumbersome for my own needs, but a few die-hard project managers out there still use it. The latest request was a couple weeks ago, so I’ve shamed myself into updating it for 2011 (and subsequent years). (more…)
- August 12, 2011
International Date Fixes for Manual Gantt Chart Spreadsheet
August 12, 2011Read moreSome time ago, I got a mysterious bug report from Mehmet, a management consultant in Turkey, about the Gantt Chart Excel Spreadsheet I’d made. I wasn’t able to reproduce the bug until I set my locale to Turkey, and even then I couldn’t figure out what was triggering the problem. Mehmet turned to his local Excel gurus, and then sent me an update email about how he’d fixed it. At the time I didn’t quite understand what he’d done, until I realized that Excel’s
Text()function, which is used heavily to convert dates to the exact bits of text I need, was not locale-independent.For example, say we have the date August 12, 2011 stored in cell A1. I can use the built-in Excel function Text() to display the “Day of the Week” in cell B2 as follows:
=Text(A1,"dddd")This displays “Friday”. However, the
"dddd"string is English-specific; the online English documentation doesn’t mention that this string changes for different languages. The convention “d for day” makes sense in English, but in Turkish it makes sense to use “g for gün”; not surprisingly, for Turkish Excel the function would have to be rewritten as:=Text(A1,"gggg")This has proven to be a broader problem as reported on the blog, and thanks to Mehmet I can finally fix it. I’ve added a “date translation string” table to version 4 of the spreadsheet, so you can localize the date strings without having to adjust the formulas directly.
If you’re using a non-English locale, you might want to revisit the Gantt Chart Excel Spreadsheet page and download the latest version. I’ve updated the links.
On a side note, the reason this possibility didn’t occur to me was that I didn’t expect the parameters for a function like this to change from locale to locale, because from a programming perspective this would just make things harder (from my English-centric world view, anyway). To test my assumption, I just checked the PHP date format page and switched to the Turkish version to see if the format codes change; they don’t seem to. Excel, however, is targeted at everyday users operating in their own local context, so changing the date codes per locale makes a kind of sense. Unless you are an international organization, of course.
- August 9, 2011
A Desktop Wallpaper for Colleen’s “50 for 50” Fundraiser
August 9, 2011Read moreFellow explorer-writer-layabout Colleen Wainwright, AKA The Communicatrix, asked if I’d like to contribute a wallpaper design for her latest give-till-it’s-awesome brainstorm 50 for 50. It’s a fundraiser to raise $50,000 in 50 days for LA-based non-profit WriteGirl by Colleen’s 50th birthday. WriteGirl mentors teen girls in self-expression and writing, which I think is a fine thing to support. Colleen is even planning to shave her head if the target is met.
You can visit Colleen’s site to see my wallpaper design, and if you’re REALLY curious about how it came about, you can visit my newly-opened DesignThink process blog. Enjoy!
Head over to IndieGoGo to donate something to the girls. There are a lot of great rewards available.
- August 9, 2011
Designing a Desktop Wallpaper
August 9, 2011Read moreThis is a lengthy post about the process I followed to create a desktop wallpaper, calling upon my rusty illustration skills to participate in a most-worthy cause: Colleen Wainwright’s 50 for 50 fundraiser to raise a bunch of money for girls who want to write. Swoon!
