How do you label and schedule the plantings in your field?
Do you work with dates or with week numbers?
For my next spreadsheet tips, I’m going to be revisiting 5 spreadsheet concepts that I think you should be using in your crop planning.
Concept 1 – use Week Numbers!!!!
If you use the formula =weeknum() on one of your dates, you will get a number from 1 to 53.
This number corresponds to the week of the year. Week 1 being the week that includes Jan 1.
So =weeknum(2022-0-12) is week 29.
Reason 1 to use Week Numbers
Week numbers narrow down the number of dates you’re thinking about. It is easier to plan 52 weeks of the years vs 365 days of the year. Especially since most plantings are already scheduled on a weekly basis.
Reason 2 to use Week Numbers
Week numbers make sorting and filtering spreadsheets easier. You don’t have to worry about accidentally entering the date in the wrong year.
Depending on your format Jul-12 might mean July 7 in 2022. or in 2021 or 2009. This can cause havoc in your formats.
Reason 3 to use Week Numbers
You can start refer to your crops in the field by the week number they were planted on. It gives you a solid reference point to share with your team. In this picture from Right to Left week 25 lettuce week 24 lettuce week 23 lettuce week 22 lettuce
Here’s a classic Farmer Spreadsheet Academy Video About Week Numbers
One note about the video – it’s one of my earlier videos and I was still working our some video/audio quality so focus on the content.
Next Online Workshop – Thursday July 28
Details coming soon!