Link goodness below:

• New Home Sales See Huge Gain - Lots of new homes sold, but at what price?
• The Return Of Favre - At least he’s off the fence, although I don’t know how good this will be for the Packers.
• Escape To The Wine Country - Looking for summer travel deals? Check out this article.

Updates below:

• Guys, see today’s Tip of the Day for a helpful tip on how long to make your tie.
• The latest article on Microsoft Excel deals with an underused but very helpful function, COUNTA.

While this is a basic Excel function, I haven’t come across a lot of people who know about it. It’s a shame, because it’s very useful. Basically, the COUNTA function will return the number of non-blank cells in a list or array that you pass into it.

Let’s use the following sample data:

Using the above data, here’s the usage for this function:

• COUNTA(A1,A2) - This will return the count of the non-blank cells when looking at A1 and A2. In the above example, this would return two.

• COUNTA(A1:A3) - This will return the count of all the non-blank cells between and including A1 and A3. In the above example, this would return two.

• COUNTA(A1:A5,”Seven”) - This will return the count of all the non-blank cells between and including A1 and A5, and then will add one to this count for the value “Seven”. In the above example, this would return five. You can also use this syntax with specific cells instead of a range, as in the case of COUNTA(A1,A5,”Seven”).

• COUNTA(A1:A3,2) - This is very similar to the example usage above. It will return the count of all the non-blank cells between and including A1 and A3, and then will add one to this count for the value “2″. In the above example, this would return three. You can also use this syntax with specific cells instead of a range, as in the case of COUNTA(A1,A2,2).

I’ve found COUNTA to be a very useful function, especially when you have a lot of data where not all the cells are necessarily populated, and you only care about how many populated ones there are. For example, if you are calculating the average score for each question on a survey, but only want to divide by the number of surveys where this question was answered, then you would use this function to get the number to divide by.

Sorry ladies, unless you wear a tie, this tip is just for the guys. One of the questions a lot of guys have is how long to make their tie. If you don’t wear a tie very often, then you probably don’t have a good idea of where your tie should hit you. In my experience, you want to make the tip of your tie just go over your belt buckle, or hit right at the belt buckle.

I think this presents a proportioned image of you. If you tie it too short (above the belt buckle), or too long (way below the belt buckle), it’s just going to look messy and like the tie doesn’t fit you.