So, i did a data export from salesforce.com and wanted to get the month from a date time field...


The general format of DateTime fields is like this 2012-01-15T18:34:00.000Z


If suppose you have this in column D in excel, just type in the following formula in an adjacent column

Say you do it in E1

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(D1,”T”,” “),”.000Z”,”")

This eliminates the time part and you just get the date value....

Now, simply double-click on the bottom edge of E1 and the formula would be applied to the entire column E.


Now, E might still represent some number... Select the entire E column, right click and select "Format Cells" and select the category as "Date"...


To fetch the Day, Month and Year from column E, use the formulas = DAY(E1), =MONTH(E1), =YEAR(E1) ... 

If you haven't yet tried your hand with Google Visualization API's this is the best time to start...

Here is the link to the documentation to get started .. http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/reference.html

A very cool feature of this is you could generate charts just by passing parameters in the URL.

It's as simple as this, click the link https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=p3&chs=450x100&chd=t:30,20,20,15,15&chl=Open|In Progress|On Hold|Pending Confirmation|Closed

As you can see, the values in PINK color are the actual segments of the chart. You may split the entire 100% as per your req, and the text in GREEN is the value for each of the segments.

How can i use this?

Well, you could just embed this into a Standard Page Layout using just a formula field. So, you get a real time snapshot right inside your detail page.

Also, you could do some complex calculations in your apex class and pass the results of the calculation to the URL as parameters and you have a nice little graph.
 
Refer to the documentation for more samples and chart types. http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/reference.html

List<Decimal> samplevalues = new List<Decimal>();
samplevalues.add(55.0);
samplevalues.add(75.5);
samplevalues.add(99.3);
Decimal maxvalue = samplevalues[0];
        For (integer i =0;i<samplevalues.size();i++)
        {
            
            if( samplevalues[i] > maxvalue)
                maxvalue = samplevalues[i];             
        }    
system.debug('the max value is'+maxvalue);