365-day divided into 13 periods

[Guest]

Hello,

I cannot solve this one: a client is dividing a whole year into 13 periods
(average of 28 days). The financial year starts on April 1, 2005 and ends on
March 31, 2006. We need to know what date would period 8, for example,
represent? If the column labels are Period 1, Period 2, etc., what would the
middle of that period be in terms of a specific date?

I sincerely hope you can help me!

Thank you.

Helene

 

[Guest]

To find the date that each period represents, start with the first day of the
fiscal year, 4/1/2005

=(4/1/2005)+27 will give you the beginning of your second period, and so on,
through the eight period, more or less. You may need to adjust some of these
calculations, since as you say the 28-day period is an average.

Dave

 

[Guest]

Dave,

Thank you for your quick reply! Okay, so I would label column 1 "Period 1"
and enter my date values where?

Helen

 

[Guest]

Create a table, with the first column headed "Period Number" and the second
column headed "Period Start Date"

Run the formula I give down the length of the table. Then if you need to
see the beginning of a Period, just run a VLOOKUP function off that table.

Dave

 

[Dave Peterson]

And you may want to use:

=date(2005,4,1)+27

Else you'll see that 4/1/2005 is treated as 4 divided by 1 divided by 2005--not
the date that it looks like.

 

[Guest]

Dear DaveS,

Thank you both; this was exactly what I was looking for!

Helen

 

[Roger Govier]

Dave

I think Helen would need to add 28 days each time not 27.
Adding 27 will give the last day of the period, as opposed to the first
day of the subsequent period.

 

[Guest]

Roger,

I arranged the numbers; the logistics was the help I was looking for.
Actually, what I did is as follows: start period + 28 days = end period.
New start period (added one day) + 28 days = second end period, etc.

The result was exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks for the thought!