Help on formula and/or function to remove date periods within another date period

[gutavu]

Hi everyone, and thanks in advance for trying to help out...

My problem is this: I'm creating a table where I write down a start date, a finish date and the table gives me the number of days that have passed between those. Till here everything is ok (and ridiculously easy), the problem is that i have multiple date periods and some of them are one within another, and I need those not to be counted twice, i'll give you and example:

(format used mm/dd/yyyy)

1 - 04/01/2003 to 02/28/2011 has 2890 days
2 - 05/23/2004 to 07/21/2010 has 2250 days
TOTAL 5140

but the thing is, the second period is "inside" the first one, so i need a formula/function to automatically exclude that period from the final count (total), and i would need it to be done in a table with more than 200 date period entries.

Sorry for my bad english (i'm brazilian), hope you guys can help me out...

[Special-K]

What happens if the start date range is in the first range but the end date is not?
e.g.

3 - 05/23/2004 to 12/31/2011

Couldnt you sort this out with some form of MIN(start date) and MAX(finish date) ?

[gutavu]

First of all, thanks for the reply...

In the suggested hypothesis, the table would have to exclude the period comprehended between 05/23/2004 to 02/28/2011, but still count the period of 03/01/2011 to 12/31/2011...