Excel problem

[dannydingbat]

I am quite pleased with myself for entering calculations into a worksheet but need to make the result look better. I have a column which will give me the date after 20 working days have been added to a date in another column. The calculation works fine. However, the "result" column always has "27/01/1900" showing until a date is entered in the previous column. Any way of concelaing it until the correct value is available?

[Aquariel]

You could use an "IF" condition in your calculated cells as follows:

=IF(A1="","",A1+20)

Where A1 is the cell with your original date; if A1 is blank there will be nothing displayed in the output cells.

[EuanC]

Just use the formula below in your new column (using the example of your first date in your first column being cell A1)

=IF(A1="","", A1+20)

and Fill Down

[dannydingbat]

The power of this board is exceeded only by the usefulness of your answers. Many thanks to you both. That works a treat. However, that appears to add 20 days to the date to reach my new date. I need to add 20 WORKING days. I am a complete novice at Excel but this is the last thing I now need to do on this exercise to impress some important people. Can you help me a little further?

[EuanC]

You would have to use the Function WORKDAYS and the formula would look something like this :

= IF((A1= "", "", A1 + (20*WORKDAY)))

I cannot confirm this though, because I don't have the WORKDAY function loaded and the formula is raising an error message.

The WORKDAY function does not come as standard so If this function is not available, and returns the #NAME? error, install and load the Analysis ToolPak add-in.

See EXCEL Help = WORKDAY for more detail

[Machecoul]

Have you tried conditional formatting. It's in the format drop down.

You enter various values and click on format to change colours etc. If you set the colour to white it doesn't show up.

e.g (if cell value) is (equal) to (A) then click FORMAT and you can make the A any colour you want.

Play with it a bit - very useful feature.

[Ralph]

The formula you want is:
=IF(A1="","",WORKDAY(A1,20))
where A1 contains the start date and 20 is the number of days. It might be an idea to take the 20 days out and put it in another cell, say D1, then instead of putting 20 in the formula, put $D$1. Then later when you decide it'll take 30 days instead of 20, it's easy to change.