Excel for Campaign Events

A couple of commenters on yesterday's post asked for some tips on putting together their own campaign events sheet for their campaigns; glad to help.  Here are some simple Excel techniques for generating campaign events and setting them on a month and day.  It's not too sophisticated, I frequently use Excel to generate large batches of raw (random) content, plug it into my notes, and then take it from there.  If you need to generate ideas for multiple domains or regions, or multiple years, it makes sense to take the extra ten minutes and put it into Excel with some formulas instead of rolling out dice manually.

Here's how the Excel looks:

Formulas go in cells E, F, G, H.  The formula in cell E generates a random number from 1,100, nested in an IF statement to return a "Yes" if the random d100 is less than or equal the target number in column C.  Formula:  =IF(RANDBETWEEN(1,100)<(C2+1), "Yes", "No")

Cells F and G generate a number from 1 to 12 or 1 to 30 for months and days respectively, after checking to see if an event was indicated in column E.  Formula:  =IF(E3="Yes", RANDBETWEEN(1,12)," ")

Finally, column H concatenates it all together, plugging in spaces and commas.  Formula:  =IF(E3="Yes", "Month "&F3&", "&"Day "&G3&"  "&A3, " ").  I copy the final notes from column H to my actual calendar and add details from there.

Here's a functional Excel example you can snag from my dropbox to start modifying yourself:

Campaign Events Sample