The International Packing code is constructed as follows:
- The 1st character and the 4th character is the week of packing but reversed i.e. 0103 would mean week 30 (the 4th character and the 1st character together).
- The 2nd character is the day of week picked (Monday= 1, Sunday =7)
- The 3rd character is a dummy character and can be used by the packing company for their own purposes.
How to create the International Packing Code in Excel
If you set up the spreadsheet as below, you can enter the Week number and the Day of the week (we have used 0 as the dummy number). To turn it into the Packing Code you would:
- Create column E which uses the LEFT function to extract the 1st character in the week number
- Create column F using the RIGHT function to extract the 2nd character from the week
- Combine the information in the correct order using CONCAT (or CONCATENATE in older versions)
If you are unfamiliar with LEFT, RIGHT, MID and CONCATENATE you can learn about them here
How to decode the International Packing Code in Excel
If you have received the International Packing code and want to (easily) break it down into the week number and day of packing you can do the following:
- Create 4 columns (B, C, D and E) to break up the code to one character per column using LEFT, MID, and RIGHT as shown below
- In column G use CONCATENATE to join character 4 and 1 (in that order) to create the week number.
- You can just use character 2 for the day of the week
If you are unfamiliar with LEFT, RIGHT, MID and CONCATENATE you can learn about them here
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