Controlling the amount of overlap in a date

[Larz Johnston]

Hi all,

I'm making a sheet to track a large number of tasks, each of which will need a start and end date, but only a limited (X) number can be performed at a time. So if X=5, then five of the tasks should be in progress at any time. What function (or combination) would you recommend using to get this result?

[Gregb11]

To get what result? Are you saying you want a formula that tells you when there are more than 5 tasks that overlap in dates? I assume you'll be using COUNTIFS but it's hard to tell at this point. Is there a sample file you can post? (see the yellow banner at the top of the page.
(Also, are you sure you're using Excel Version 2021? I didn't think that's been released yet).

[Larz Johnston]

Right, sorry: first time posting.

I've attached a sample of what basically happening: imagine you have several stations and a few workers (fewer workers than stations in this case). A station can only run one job at a time, time may or may not vary depending on the job, and the product must go through the stations in order.

I'm not interested in trying to optimise the position of workers or order to take the jobs through, but I do want to know how I can automate delaying a job until a worker is open to do it if all the workers are already taken up.

[Larz Johnston]

hang on, I missed the attachment, still getting the hang of this.

[Gregb11]

In the Yellow banner it says, "and some manually calculated results". Where are your manually calculated results? I don't know what the "Time" columns represent. (Also, what about your excel version?)