Anyone Good at Excell?

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I have a quick excel question and not surprisingly it IS sheep related.

I have been trying to set up a spreadsheet that calculates how much feed I have on the farm, how much I bring to the farm and how much I feed out. I got the simple stuff figured out, like daily averages and stuff and so every day as I type in what I just fed the sheep, it deducts it from a list and makes a nice little chart that shows me how much I have left.

I want to take this a step farther though. I want to predict when the feed will run out based on what I have fed out. For example, I have 2200 pounds of hay here now, and feed out 20 pounds per day on average. At that rate I will run out in 110 days. Okay that is easy to do, but my question is, can Excel calculate this on a calendar? If it knows today is 11-16-08, can it tell me when 110 days from now is? Can it work in that format?

I can go to a separate date and time calendar and figure it in, (Friday, March 6, 2009) but its a one time use. I would like to have this constantly running so as I type every day what I feed to the sheep, I have an idea when it will run out. That way if I add to my flock, or feed more out for whatever reason, its automatically calculated for me.

I know Excel pretty well, but I am not sure if it can work between dates?
 
Whoops, I messed up. Can a Mod slap me upside the head and then transfer this over to the Off Topic discussion. I thought I was on off-topic when I wrote this. Sorry for the extra work.


EDIT by John : Hey there Travis, consider yourself slapped and moved :)
 
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Travis,

Here is a example. Date in excel is actually a number, so all you are really doing is adding 2 numbers together.

travis.jpg

Let me know if this doesnt help.

Randy
 
Hey Travis try this =TODAY() + 20

That will calculate 20 days from today's date.
The 20 can be put in as any value -- a number, an equation, a field -- whatever

If field A1 is lbs of hay left =TODAY() + (A1/20)
If field A2 is lbs fed per day it would be =TODAY() + (A1/A2)


If you already have the number of days left in a field (say C4) it would be =TODAY() +C4

Don't forget to set your field display to a date setting.
I'm using version 2007 -- it may vary if you have a different version ??
Hope this helps -- Tony
 
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Mashups

Yep that's what I needed. Thanks guys now I know.

Now the next spreadsheet question and one that is much harder and maybe not even doable. That's pulling lamb futures off the USDA's website. They continually track the price of lamb and for the North Eastern States and beyond, New Holland PA Livestock auction is what sets the price. It would be great to have a weekly update as to the price of lamb and wool and then have my own spreadsheet track and chart those changes.

I bought my sheep from a USDA woman that did computer work for that division and she says I need what is known as a Mashup. Something that can take their type of file and then convert it to an Excel File, but even for her it was too complicated to figure out how to do.

Again I can manually check the weekly prices, then manually put them into my spreadsheet, but I often forget to do that. An automatic version would be better. Here is the website I want to get the information from. Is what I want to do possible with Excel?

http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/ln_ls322.txt
 
Thanks Greg, that worked quite well and quite easily. Now I just got to figure out how to organize the data better. It imports just fine, but I surmise that the two data sources get screwy in the transfer. It comes through intact, but fails to separate the figures into Excel Cells. It dumps it it all into a single column that is unusable.

I will fuss with it some more and am sure over time will get what I want, in the meantime you helped me over the biggest hurdle. Again thanks.
 
Travis, you may want to contact the site to see if they have the report in spreadsheet format or in a format so you import with columns . Most likely not but worth a try.

Mark
 
Thanks Greg, that worked quite well and quite easily. Now I just got to figure out how to organize the data better. It imports just fine, but I surmise that the two data sources get screwy in the transfer. It comes through intact, but fails to separate the figures into Excel Cells. It dumps it it all into a single column that is unusable.

I will fuss with it some more and am sure over time will get what I want, in the meantime you helped me over the biggest hurdle. Again thanks.

Hi Travis
I think part of your problem is that the data you are pulling is a text file. You can work this out from the .txt ending of the address.
 
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