Use Excel's Workday function to determine delivery dates

Microsoft Excel

Instead of telling customers they should expect to receive their orders within 10 business days, you can give them an expected date of arrival.

Follow these steps to set up a worksheet that lets Excel calculate the delivery date:

1. Enter the headings for Order No., Order Date, and Delivery Date, as shown in Figure A.

Figure A

2. Select N2:O2.
3. Press Shift + Ctrl + Down Arrow.
4. Right-click the selection and choose Format Cells.
5. Select Date under Category and 03/14/01 under Type (Figure B).
6. Click OK.

Figure B

7. Select J2.
8. Press Shift + Ctrl + Down Arrow.
9. Right-click the selection and select Format Cells.
10. Select Date under Category and 14-Mar-01 under Type.
11. Click OK.
12. Complete the Holiday Table as shown.
13. Select J2:J9.
14. Click in the Name box and enter Holidays_2008.
15. Click in O2 and enter the following formula:

=WORKDAY(N2,10,Holidays_2008)

16. Copy the formula to O2:O3 to obtain the delivery dates for Orders 2 and 3.

Figure C

Microsoft Access

Field validation rules ensure that any data entered into a field conforms to business rules. But what if the data entered into one field is dependent upon what is entered into another field?

For example, say that a company has set maximum credit limits for customers from certain states; therefore, the rule for the Creditlimit field is determined by the State field. To set the table properties for this validation rule, follow these steps:

1. Open the Customer table in Design View.
2. Open the table property sheet (Figure A).

Figure A

3. Click in the Validation Rule property box and then click the Build button.
4. In the Expression Builder Dialog box, type the following expression at the prompt:

[State]In ("MO") AND  [CreditLimit]<=30000 Or [State] In("IL")  
AND CreditLimit]<=20000 Or [State]Not In ("MO","IL")

5. Click OK.
6. Click in the Validation Text box of the Table's Property Sheet and enter Value entered is above customer's credit limit (Figure B).

Figure B

Now when an attempt is made to enter a credit limit amount above the maximum for the customer's location, an error message is displayed (Figure C).

Figure C

Microsoft Word

Both of the headings on the page are formatted in the Heading 1 style, so why don't they look alike? Rather than try to guess what the differences are, use Reveal Formatting and have Word figure it out for you.

Follow these steps:

1. Open the document.
2. Select one of the two headings.
3. Press Shift + F1.
4. Click the Compare To Another Selection check box in the Reveal Formatting pane (Figure A).

Figure A

5. Select the second heading.

Word will display the formatting differences in the task pane. In this example, the difference is that the second selection's font size is slightly larger than the first (Figure B).