TOPIC: MICROSOFT EXCEL
Practical Excel skills for dates, locked files and text splitting
10th March 2026
Excel has a reputation for simplicity that does not always survive contact with real working life. Project schedules need to respect weekends and public holidays, files arrive locked at precisely the moment edits are most urgent, and data lands in cells formatted in ways that resist immediate analysis. Three everyday tasks illustrate this gap well: calculating future or past dates that exclude non-working days, removing or working around read-only restrictions when genuine edits are required, and splitting text strings cleanly at the first or Nth delimiter. The guidance below draws on established Excel features, keeping the emphasis firmly on what works in practice.
Working with Business Calendars
The WORKDAY Function
Working with dates that observe a business calendar is a frequent requirement in scheduling, logistics and reporting. Excel's WORKDAY function is designed for this purpose and returns a date that is a given number of working days from a start date, excluding Saturdays and Sundays by default. At its simplest, a formula such as =WORKDAY(A1,5) moves forward five working days from the date in A1. The function can also respect a list of holidays so that results avoid specific non-working dates as well as weekends, as in =WORKDAY(A1,5,C1:C3), which skips any matching dates in C1:C3 when calculating the result.
A concrete example shows how this behaves with a real date. Using named ranges for readability, with start referring to cell B5, days to B8, and holidays to B11:B13, the formula =WORKDAY(start,days) returns the next working day five days after 23rd December 2024. With weekends excluded, but no holidays provided, the result is Monday 30th December 2024. When holidays are supplied with =WORKDAY(start,days,holidays), the function also avoids the listed dates in B11:B13 and produces Thursday 2nd January 2025. In all cases, the weekend definition is Saturday and Sunday, and the holidays must be stored as valid Excel dates to be recognised correctly.
Visualising the Path to the Result
It often helps to see the individual dates that WORKDAY steps through when reaching its answer. A compact way to achieve this is to generate a short run of consecutive dates from the start date and display them alongside abbreviated day names. Using =SEQUENCE(13,1,start) in cell D5 creates thirteen dates beginning with the date held in the named range start because Excel dates are serial numbers that increment by one per day. Formatting these cells with the custom number format ddd, dd-mmm-yy shows an abbreviated weekday alongside the date, making it straightforward to spot weekends at a glance.
Conditional formatting can then shade non-working days directly within this generated block. Because WORKDAY does not evaluate a date when zero is supplied for the argument called days, a small workaround helps determine whether a given date is itself a working day. In column D, a rule based on the formula =WORKDAY(D5-1,1)<>D5 asks WORKDAY for the next working day after the previous day; if the answer does not equal the date in D5, then D5 is not a working day and can be shaded grey. A similar rule for column E, =WORKDAY(E5-1,1,holidays)<>E5, incorporates the named holiday range and produces additional shading where dates overlap with the supplied holiday list as well as weekends.
Highlighting calculated end dates ties the visualisation together. If the main results appear in G5 and G6, cells in column D can be highlighted when equal to $G$5 using a rule such as =D5=$G$5, and cells in column E can be highlighted when equal to $G$6 using =E5=$G$6. If preferred, the formatting rules can be defined without relying on G5 and G6 by embedding the WORKDAY calls directly in the comparisons, as in =D5=WORKDAY(start,days) and =E5=WORKDAY(start,days,holidays). In either arrangement, there are four conditional formatting rules in play across the grid: two to shade non-working days and two to pick out the final dates.
Handling Non-Standard Working Weeks
Work patterns do not always match the standard five-day week. Where a schedule follows a different rhythm, such as a four-day or six-day working week, switching to the WORKDAY.INTL function is the appropriate step. It follows the same principle as WORKDAY, returning a date a set number of business days from a start date while optionally excluding holidays, but it accepts a custom definition of which weekdays count as working days. This flexibility allows organisations that operate alternative rosters to generate accurate due dates without resorting to manual adjustments or complex helper columns.
Managing Read-Only Excel Files
There are several reasons why a workbook might be set to read-only: preventing accidental erasure of data, or ensuring a file remains unchanged as it passes between parties. Each form of protection serves a different purpose and has a distinct method for disabling it. ExcelRibbon.Tips.Net is a useful ongoing reference for these and many other workbook and security scenarios across Excel 2007 and later versions.
Read-Only Recommended
The lightest touch is the Read-Only Recommended setting. When a workbook carries this flag, Excel prompts on opening with a dialogue asking whether to open it as read-only. This method applies across all versions of Microsoft Excel from 2003 through to current releases. To remove the recommendation, open the workbook, use File > Save As and choose Browse to open the Save As window, then select Tools in the lower right of the dialogue, pick General Options, clear the Read-Only Recommended checkbox and click OK before saving. The next time the file opens, the prompt does not appear.
Marked as Final
A firmer signal is applied when a workbook is Marked as Final. In this state, commands, typing and proofing marks are all disabled, and Excel displays a Marked as Final notification bar at the top of the worksheet. To turn this off when editing is required, click Edit Anyway on the notification bar. This removes the read-only state for the current copy and allows modifications to proceed. The flag is more about signalling completion than enforcing security, so the application provides a clear override directly within the interface.
Password to Modify
Password protection introduces a stronger barrier. When a workbook has a Password to Modify set, a dialogue appears on opening that invites the password or offers the option to open the file as read-only; without the password, the file cannot be modified directly. A pragmatic path when only a working copy is needed is to open the original in read-only mode, then use File > Save As with Browse, select Tools > General Options, clear the Password to Modify field and confirm with OK before saving under a new name. Opening the newly saved file allows edits because it no longer carries a modification password. Using a third-party utility to crack a password on someone else's file is inadvisable and potentially inappropriate, so the better route is to request an editable version from whoever sent the document.
Operating System-Level Restrictions on a Mac
Occasionally, the read-only state is imposed not by Excel but by the operating system, where the file has been locked so that only the owner can edit it. On a Mac, the fix is made outside Excel: locate the file in Finder, right-click it and choose Get Info, then clear the Locked checkbox before reopening the file in Excel. If the issue is one of permissions rather than a simple lock, the Get Info window also contains a Sharing and Permissions section at the bottom. This lists each user alongside a drop-down privilege set to either Read Only or Read and Write, and the file owner can adjust these entries to grant editing access to the relevant users.
Operating System-Level Restrictions on a PC
On a PC, the equivalent controls are found in File Explorer. Right-clicking the workbook and choosing Properties opens the General tab, where unchecking the Read-Only attribute and clicking OK is often sufficient to restore full access. If the restriction stems from security permissions rather than the file attribute, the Security tab lists the groups and usernames that have access along with their permission levels. Clicking Edit beneath that list allows the file owner to adjust access for individual entries, including granting the ability to modify the file where that is justified.
Splitting Text in Excel
LEFT, MID and RIGHT
Reshaping text is another everyday requirement in Excel, and the LEFT, MID and RIGHT functions provide predictable building blocks. LEFT extracts a specified number of characters from the start of a string, MID extracts from a given position in the middle, and RIGHT extracts from the end. For instance, =LEFT("test string",2) returns te, =MID("test string",6,3) returns str, and =RIGHT("test string",2) returns ng. When exact character counts are known in advance these functions can be applied directly, but real data often arrives with variable-length segments separated by spaces or other delimiters, so the position of the delimiter must first be discovered before extraction can take place.
Splitting at the First Delimiter
To split at the first occurrence of a delimiter such as a space, combining these extraction functions with FIND or SEARCH is effective. Both functions return the position of a substring within a string, with the key distinction that FIND is case-sensitive while SEARCH is not. Suppose cell A1 contains test string. To return everything to the left of the first space, use =LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1)-1). Here FIND returns 5 as the position of the space, subtracting 1 yields 4, and LEFT uses that figure to return test. To return the text to the right of the first space, the formula subtracts the space position from the total string length: =RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-FIND(" ",A1)). In this example, LEN(A1) is 11 and the FIND result is 5, so the expression evaluates to 6 and RIGHT returns string. The pattern generalises to other delimiters by replacing the space character with the required alternative.
Locating the Nth Delimiter
Locating the Nth occurrence of a delimiter takes an extra step because FIND and SEARCH identify only the first match after a given starting point. A common technique relies on SUBSTITUTE to mark the Nth occurrence with a unique character that does not appear elsewhere in the text, then uses FIND to locate it. Consider An example text string in A1 and a requirement to return everything up to the third space. Substituting the third space with a vertical bar creates a dependable marker: =SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","|",3) produces An example text|string. Finding the bar with =FIND("|",SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","|",3)) returns 16, the position of the marker. LEFT can then extract the part before that position by subtracting one: =LEFT(A1,FIND("|",SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","|",3))-1), which returns An example text. Combining the steps in this way makes the formula self-contained and avoids the need for helper cells.
These text approaches extend naturally to extracting the segment after the Nth delimiter by using MID or RIGHT, with similar position logic. Replacing LEFT with MID and adjusting the start index to the marker position plus one retrieves the portion that follows. The same idea works with second or fourth occurrences by changing the instance number inside SUBSTITUTE. When working with data sets that include inconsistent spacing or punctuation, it is worth verifying that the chosen marker character does not already appear in the source text, since the method depends on its uniqueness within each processed string.
Bringing These Techniques Together in Your Excel Workflows
These three strands combine to form a toolkit that handles a surprising range of everyday scenarios. WORKDAY and WORKDAY.INTL anchor date calculations to real-world calendars so that estimates and commitments respect weekends and public holidays, while the SEQUENCE-based visualisation grid can help colleagues understand how an end date is reached rather than simply accepting a single cell value. Managing read-only states allows teams to balance protection with flexibility, with the key being to identify which type of restriction applies before attempting to remove it. LEFT, MID and RIGHT, combined with FIND and SUBSTITUTE, turn messy text into consistent fields ready for further analysis.
Adding line breaks in Excel in a Citrix Windows session on a Mac
18th August 2025
Today, I tried connecting to a client system using my Mac Mini. Everything went well, aside perhaps from some resizing, apart from something more crucial: adding a line break in a cell in an Excel spreadsheet. The usual combination of ALT+ENTER was not doing the needful. Instead, I needed to use CMD+OPTION+ENTER, as it would be on a Mac keyboard. Since I use a Windows one inside, it looks like this: WIN+ALT+ENTER. It was only by looking through the options for the Citrix Workspace app that came upon this after being prompted to do so by ChatGPT, itself not supplying the fully correct information that I needed. Now, all I need to do is remember to use the correct keyboard shortcut, and I am away.
A way to survey hours of daylight for locations of interest
9th September 2024
A few years back, I needed to get sunrise and sunset information for a location in Ireland. This was to help me plan visits to a rural location with a bus service going nearby, and I did not want to be waiting on the side of the road in the dark on my return journey. It ended up being a project that I undertook using the Julia programming language.
This had other uses too: one was the planning of trips to North America. This was how I learned that evenings in San Francisco were not as long as their counterparts in Ireland. Later, it had its uses in assessing the feasibility of seeing other parts of the Pacific Northwest during the month of August. Other matters meant that such designs never came to anything.
The Sunrise Sunset API was used to get the times for the start and end of daylight. That meant looping through the days of the year to get the information, but I needed to get the latitude and longitude information from elsewhere to fuel that process. While Google Maps has its uses with this, it is a manual and rather fiddly process. Sparing use of Nomintim's API is what helped with increasing the amount of automation and user-friendliness, especially what comes from OpenStreetMap.
Accessing using Julia's HTTP package got me the data in JSON format that I then converted into atomic vectors and tabular data. The end product is an Excel spreadsheet with all the times in UTC. A next step would be to use the solar noon information to port things to the correct timezone. It can be done manually in Excel and its kind, but some more automation would make things smoother.
Stop Excel 365 saving files to OneDrive by default
8th June 2024
Recently, I was doing some work in Excel (while I use the 365 version, this may work with others too) when I found it offering to save a file to OneDrive by default. My preference is to keep everything local, especially given the limitations of online storage. Thus, I sought a way to do just this.
That meant going to File > Options and then to the Save tab. In there, I found the option called Save to Computer by default and activated that. The default local location can be changed too, but I left this as it was because I tend to use multiple file locations anyway. Clicking on the OK button after making the change that I wanted was enough to set the behaviour as I required, and I no longer see the prompt for online storage since then.
Adding titles and footnotes to Excel files created using SAS
14th August 2023
Using the Excel and ExcelXP destinations in the Output Delivery System (ODS), SAS can generate reports as XLSX workbooks with one or more worksheets. Recently, I was updating a SAS Macro that created one of these and noticed that there were no footnotes. The fix was a simple: add to the options specified on the initial ODS Excel statement.
ods excel file="&outdir./&file_name..xlsx" options(embedded_titles="yes" embedded_footnotes="yes");
Notice in the code above that there are EMBEDDED_TITLES and EMBEDDED_FOOTNOTES options. Without both of these being set to YES, no titles or footnotes will appear in a given worksheet, even if they have been specified in a program using TITLE or FOOTNOTE statements. In my case, it was the EMBEDDED_FOOTNOTES option that was missing, so adding that set things to rights.
The thing applies to the ExcelXP tag set, as you will find from a code sample that SAS has shared on their website. That was what led me to the solution to what was happening in the Excel ODS destination in my case.
Solving SAS PROC IMPORT Error 8000101D when reading Excel files on entimICE
26th November 2022
Recently, I encountered the following kind of message when reading an Excel file into SAS using PROC IMPORT:
ERROR: Error opening XLSX file -> xxx-.xlsx . It is either not an Excel spreadsheet or it is damaged. Error code=8000101D
Requested Input File Is Invalid
ERROR: Import unsuccessful. See SAS Log for details.
Naturally, thoughts arise regarding the state of the Excel file when you see a message like this, but that was not the case because the file opened successfully in Excel and looked OK to me. After searching on the web, I found that it was a file permissions issue. The actual environment that I was using at the time was entimICE, and I had forgotten to set up a link that granted read access to the file. Once that was added, the problem got resolved. In other systems, checking on file system permissions is needed, even if the message seems to suggest that you are experiencing a file integrity problem.
Shrinking title bar search box in Microsoft Office 365 applications
6th December 2019
It might be a new development, but I only recently spotted the presence of a search box in the titles of both Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel that I have as part of an Office 365 subscription. Though handy for searching file contents and checking on spelling and grammar, I also realised that the boxes take up quite a bit of space and decided to see if hiding them was possible.
In the event, I found that they could be shrunk from a box to an icon that expanded to pop up a box when you clicked on them. Since I did not need the box to be on view all the time, that outcome was sufficient for my designs, though it may not satisfy others who want to hide this functionality completely.
To get it, it was a matter of going to File > Options and putting a tick in the box next to the Collapse the Microsoft Search box by default entry in the General tab before clicking on the OK button. Doing that freed up some title bar space as desired, and searching is only a button press away.
A hidden cost of sharing Excel workbooks
10th November 2010
Recently, I encountered a reason to be wary about creating shared Excel spreadsheets when one ballooned in size. It ended up growing to around 130 megabytes before I tried turning off sharing to see what happened and the size shrunk to under 200 kilobytes. From this, it would appear that the version control information was the cause of the explosion in file size.
With that in mind, I set about to looking through the settings to see if there were any that might need optimisation. While the default action is to keep thirty days of change tracking, I have this reduced to a single day in order not to be keeping too much. Quite how much you need to retain is up to you, but I will be keeping an eye on things now that I have done this.
One reason why you cannot merge cells in Excel
23rd October 2010
One handy thing that I didn't realise that you could do with Excel until the last few months was the ability to share an open workbook between users and collate any changes that are made (it seems that a form of version control is behind this). From what I have seen, Excel seems to manage changes to shared spreadsheets rather well. When you save yours, it adds updates from other users and warns if any edits collide with one another. To activate it in Excel 2003, all that needs doing is for you to go to the Share Workbook entry on the Tools and tick the appropriate checkbox in the resulting dialogue box. In 2007 and 2010, look for the Share Workbook icon in the Review tab on the ribbon to get the same dialogue box popping up.
That's not to say that it doesn't have its restrictions, though. For example, I have found that the merging of cells is made unavailable, but that can be sorted by unsharing and resharing the workbook when no one else is using it. As to why cell merger is switched off by sharing, I have a few ideas. Maybe, they couldn't make it work reliably (can happen with large software development projects like the creation of a new version of Excel) or decided that it would have consequences for other users that are too inconvenient. Either way, we cannot merge cells in shared workbooks, and that's the way that things are for now. Some may not worry about this though, since they reckon that cell merging is undesirable anyway; well, don't go doing it in any spreadsheet that is likely to be read in by another program, or you could cause trouble.
Reading data into SAS using the EXCEL and PCFILES library engines
4th March 2010
Recently, I had the opportunity to have a look at the Excel library engine again because I need to read Excel data into SAS. You need SAS Access for PC Files licensed for it to work, but it does simplify the process of getting data from spreadsheets into SAS. It all revolves around setting up a library pointing at the Excel file using the Excel engine. The result is that every worksheet in the file is treated like a SAS dataset, even if their names contain characters that SAS considers invalid for dataset names. The way around that is to enclose the worksheet name in single quotes with the letter n straight after the closing quote, much in the same way as you'd read in text strings as SAS date values ('04MAR2010'd, for example). To make all of this clearer, I have added some example code below.
libname testxl excel 'c:\test.xls';
data test;
set testxl.'sheet1$'n;
run;All of the above does apply to SAS on Windows (I have used it successfully in 9.1.3 and 9.2) but there appears to be a way of using the same type of thing on UNIX too. Again, SAS Access for PC Files is needed as well as a SAS PC Files server on an available Windows machine, and it is the PCFILES engine that is specified. While I cannot say that I have had the chance to see it working in practice but seeing it described in SAS Online Documentation corrected my previous misimpressions about the UNIX variant of SAS and its ability to read in Excel or Access data. Well, you learn something new every day.