Excel Quick Tip: Counting occurrences of a character in a cell

I found an interesting problem recently. We have a shared google docs at work for folks to sign up for hobby clubs. The idea was people to sign up against clubs by adding their names in a cell.

In the next week or so, the docs was filled with names and I wondered if there was a cool way to count the people who had signed up, using a simple formulae.

So here is the solution, which works both in excel and google docs.

Excel Quick Tip: Finding Year and Quarter from dates

I deal with huge data around dates all the time.  Be it daily revenue, volume or activities. Though daily data is interesting,  we often need to aggregate data into weeks, months or quarters, to see trends, forecast projections and track them against targets.

Here is a quick tip on getting you the year, month, quarter and weeks from a given date. Read on.