Category: Excel Formulas

It’s Thanksgiving here in Canada, so I’m taking the day off.And if you’d like to know when the USA Thanksgiving occurs this year, keep reading!

All Signs Point to Excel

Below is a photo from my travels last week.

This tiny snack bar is selling something we should all be thankful for — Excel!

I’m sure you’ll agree that Microsoft Excel should be available almost everywhere! It’s nearly as important as water, for getting through the day.

When Is USA Thanksgiving?

Some holidays are celebrated on the same date every year, like New Year’s Day, Canada Day, and Christmas.

Other holidays are the Nth weekday in a specific month. For example, USA Thanksgiving occurs on the 4th Thursday in November

To calculate the date, use one of the formulas on the Find Nth Weekday in Month page, on my Contextures site.

Video: Find Nth Weekday

[Update} I made this video in 2022, and the formula uses the WORKDAY.INTL function, which is available in Excel 2010 or later

This video shows how to find the Nth weekday in a specific month and year, by using the WORKDAY.INTL function in an Excel formula.This function is available in Excel 2010 or later.

To calculate the date in earlier versions of Excel, use one of the WEEKDAY formulas on the Find Nth Weekday in Month page, on my Contextures site.

Last weekend I set up a little spreadsheet in Excel to compare the cost of a trip in a rented RV versus a small car. The only gas consumption numbers I could find for the RV were in miles per gallon.

Convert to Metric

Since we use the metric system here in Canada, I needed to convert everything to kilometres and litres.

Fortunately, Excel has a CONVERT worksheet function that makes the conversion easy.

The only tricky part is remembering the codes for each type of unit. Most are intuitive, such as ft for foot and g for gram, but a few aren’t, like lbm for pound mass.

Convert Litres to Gallons

To calculate how many litres are in a gallon, I used the formula:
=CONVERT(1, “gal”,”l”)

In the formula, gal is the code for gallon, and l (lower case L) is the code for litre.

And yes, it’s way more expensive to make the trip in an RV.