search in different columns

Hallo, my question is the following: I have an excel list containing a number of names of persons who have to introduce four papers in a period of say one year. The list contains four colums in which the date of receival of each paper is noted. Another column is added in which is calculated whether the paper came in on time or too late, so this can e.g. be 5 or -3 meaning introduced 5 days in advance or 3 days too late.
My question is: if I want a list containing only the papers introduced in one particular month, how do I proceed? If I want e.g. all the papers introduced in januari 2008 (I already added a column with only year and month) the formula has to search in four columns. I already tried it using a pivot table but I do not know how to combine the four colums. Additional question: it is also necessary to have the avarage number of days in which the papers were introduced. Hope someone can help me with this! Thanks in advance!

Nadine

That might just be a little bit too easy I think The information as to the year and month is spread over four columns so a simple filter will not do the job...

The problem is that if I want e.g. to know how many papers we received in the month of january, the information can stand in different columns. What I did now is to put a filter in first column, then copy and paste into new document, put filter in second column, add it to new document etc. but this means that I have to do this for each single month.. I thought there might be an easier way to do it e.g. using a pivot table so that it would be possible to get the information needed only by changing the month....

Try attached formula in your sheet...

That provides already a huge help! Thanks! Do you have any idea how I could calculate the average of the days of the papers introduced in january? A minus sign means too late and no sign means number of days in advance. The problem is again that the information can not be found in one column but depends on when the paper was introduced....

Could you explain your question ?

Sorry if the information is not too clear. In the excel table your see next to each column containing a date, another column in which it is indicated whether the paper was introduced in due time. So this either appears as a positive or negative number depending on whether the paper was introduced e.g. 5 days ahead or 3 days late. For each month I would have to calculate the avarage of these days.
The problem is thus that it should be possible to return the information contained in the column with the date wanted plus one. But I do not know how to do this... It would have to be something like 'if one of the colums contains date wanted e.g. january 2008, give me the information in the column next to it'. Hopes this makes it more clear..