Julian date in spreadsheets

The ordinal date, i.e., the day of the year, is a number that ranges from 1 for January 1 through 365 or 366 for December 31, depending if the year is a leap year. The ordinal date is also referred to as the "Julian date", though in astronomy "Julian date" is not the ordinal date, but a serial date system starting on January 1, 4713 B.C.E.

If you wish to display the current ordinal date in a spreadsheet, such as a Microsoft Excel or a Google Sheets worksheet you can use the formula below:

=TEXT(TODAY() ,"yyyy")&TEXT((TODAY() -DATEVALUE("1/1/"&TEXT(TODAY(),"yy"))+1),"000")

That formula will insert the current day in Julian format with a four-digit year. E.g. for March 23, 2014, it would result in 2014082 appearing in the cell where the forumla is used, since March 23, 2014 is the 82^nd day of 2014. If you just wish to display the day of the year and not the year, you can use the formula below:

=TEXT((TODAY() -DATEVALUE("1/1/"&TEXT(TODAY(),"yy"))+1),"000")

That forumula will display 082 in the cell in which the formula is used.

References:

1. Insert Julian dates
   Support - Office.com

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W3C Validation

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international standards organization for the World Wide Web (WWW). Among the services offered by the W3C are a Markup Validation Service a Link Checker, a CSS Validation Service, and RSS Feed Validation Service. The services are free.

The markup validation service allows you to submit a URL for a webpage to be checked by the service or to upload an HTML file to be checked for incorrect HTML code. If the code in a webpage is incorrect, you may not see the results you expect for the webpage when it is displayed in a browser or it may display incorrectly in some browsers used by visitors to the page. The W3C tool will notify you of the types of errors on the page and the line numbers on which they are found. You can match those lines numbers with the appropriate lines in the code in browsers that allow you to view the source code of a page.

You can provide a URL to the link checker tool and it will determine if any of the links on the webpage are invalid.

The CSS validation service allows you to check the validity of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) used on webpages to control the appearance and formatting of the pages. You can provide a URL for a CSS or upload a CSS file to be verified.

The W3C Feed Validation Service will check the syntax of Atom or RSS feeds. E.g., if you use RSS to publish updated information on blog entries, you can provide the URL for the index.rss file on your site.

The W3C provides other tools as well at Quality Assurance Tools. All of the software developed at the W3C is Open Source / Free software, which means that you can use the software for free and download the code, if you wish. You can also modify the code to suit your own purposes, if you wish.

There is also a paid W3C Validator Suite™, if you wish to have the W3C validate an entire site automatically rather than you validating pages individually.

Note: the W3C validation services can't check pages that require authentication, but can only check pages that are accessible from the Internet without passwords or files that you upload to be checked.

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