» tips and tricks

Mac tip – showing folder sizes

Rob Gray — Sun, 02 May 2010 08:59:47 +0000

By default, in the Mac finder you can see the size of individual files but not folders (unless you click on “get info” for each one.

However it’s easy to set the option to see the folder size. Just go Finder, View, Show View Options, and select the “calculate all sizes” box.

Bear in mind that the reason this is deselected by default is that performance may become slightly degraded when it’s switched on. Personally I see no difference but bear it in mind.

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Currency conversion in Google spreadsheets

Rob Gray — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:28:02 +0000

This is pretty useful and I can never remember the exact syntax, so here it is for me (and now you) to remember.

In a Google spreadsheet, you can do an online currency conversion that looks up the exchange rate in real time, making my life much easier.

For example to get EUR to GBP just type

=googlefinance(("CURRENCY:EURGBP"))

(note: if you copy and paste this and get an error, replace the quotation marks ( ” ) with your own. For some reason the blog template sometimes changes the quote symbol into it’s own format. I think I’ve fixed it but just in case…)

which will give you the rate ( you can then use that to convert existing cells to whatever currency you wish)

This makes it really easy to build an expense forecasting sheet like this that auto updates the exchange rate


.	date	description	amount EUR	amount ZAR	amount GBP
.	06/10/2009	Hotel Prince de Galles, Paris	€ 258.10		£232
.	08/10/2009	Butcher Shop and Grill, Johannesburg		R 5,346.00	£432
.	21/10/2009	Taxi – Amsterdam	€ 10.00		£9
.	21/10/2009	Helicopter: Monaco	€ 134.00		£120
.	01/11/2009	Hotel Monaco	€ 756.89		£679
.	02/11/2009	Lunch Cafe Royale	€ 324.00		£291
.
.		Total			£1,762

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Spreadsheets: how to count weekdays between 2 dates

Rob Gray — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:37:58 +0000

One of the things I often need to do is to calculate the number of work days between 2 dates in order to calculate billable days. There is a very useful function called NETWORKDAYS which does exactly this. It works the same in both Excel and Google Spreadsheets

The syntax is =NETWORKDAYS (start_date, end_date, [holidays])

example =NETWORKDAYS (14/09/2009, 10/11/2009, 18/09/2009) gives you 41 days. In my example I only used one holiday but you can of course include multiple days in there.

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