Can Numbers automatically input every Tuesday/Wednesday, etc. of the month?

Question

Hi folks - I am trying to help out a friend who has built an invoice in Pages for her business. She sees clients a few times a month, typically on the same day each week. I don't have experience with Pages and Numbers...I'm guessing that Numbers has more powerful formula abilities, but then she could insert a Numbers table into Pages?
In any case, what I'm hoping to set up for her is something like this:
Somewhere - in the form, in a database? - she inputs the day of the week that she sees the client. This would generally be the same from month to month although could change periodically. When she opens the invoice form, the invoice date would auto-enter (that much I know how to do). Then, in the table, where it lists each date of service, the form would take the day of the week for that client, and automatically enter the dates that month. Does that make sense? So she opens a form for a Tuesday client, the form puts in today's dates, and automatically enters all the Tuesdays for this month.
Possible?
Thanks,
Lisa

Answer 1

lisasmitsky wrote:
So she opens a form for a Tuesday client, the form puts in today's dates, and automatically enters all the Tuesdays for this month.
Possible?
Hi Lisa,
Possible, but I think you might want to redesign the forms as a Numbers document for reasons noted below.
Here's a table showing the results for two clients, one seen each Friday, the other each Wednesday. Days were chosen to show a four week and a five week example.
The weekday is entered in A1, and the current date in B2 (by whatever means you wish to use).
Cells E1:F8 constitute a lookup table where the weekday name entered in A1 is used as a search key to determine a number to be used in the formula calculating the first date in the current month falling on that weekday.
That formula is in C2:
=B-DAY(B)+1+MOD(LOOKUP($A$1,E,F)+7-WEEKDAY(B-DAY(B)),7)
The first part of the formula, B-DAY(B), calculates a base date, the last day of the previous month. The rest adds the number of days necessary to get to the first Friday (or Wednesday) in the current month.
C3, C4 and C5 contain a formula that adds seven days to the date in the cell above:
C3: =C2+7
C6 has the same formula, enclosed in an IF statement that checks whether the calculated date falls in the current month. If it does, the date is displayed (Wednesday, June 29); otherwise a null string is returned and the cell appears empty (Friday example).
C6: =IF(MONTH(C5+7)=MONTH(C5),C5+7,"")
Pages supports the same functions as Numbers, so the table could be copied and pasted directly into a Pages document.
What Pages doesn't support, though (or supports in a manner not described in the User Guide), is the ability to Hide the columns containing the Lookup table, or to place the lookup table on a separate Table. Hence my suggestion above to consider rethinking this as a Numbers document.
Regards,
Barry
The functions used are described, with examples, in the iWork Formulas and Functions User Guide. The F&F guide and the Numbers '09 User Guide may be downloaded via the Help menu in Numbers. For the Pages '09 User Guide, use the Help menu in Pages.
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