Overlay worksheets with formatting

[danellis]

My firm currently uses Excel to manage its production programme. We have rows for different jobs and columns with dates.

Each person at the firm has a colour. the relevant cell is filled with the person's colour to indicate they're working on that jobs that day. A note is often added to indicate the particular task. A sample is attached - or it would be if that button worked! I'll upload the thread and hopefully be able to add the attachment...

Management are considering splitting the programme into three (Design, Production, and Engineering) so that different people can manage different areas of work.

I've been asked to investigate ways of overlaying these three programmes so that they can be viewed together. Everything I've come across seems to take the values of cells but not the fill colour.

I was hoping someone here could suggest something?

dJE

[xladept]

I don't get it - can you walk through an example or two?

[Richard Buttrey]

Hi,

It's not immediately clear to me how this all works nor indeed what you mean by splitting the program into three areas.
Nor is it clear what the purpose of column A is.

The usual way of presenting this sort of information is with a GANTT chart where each job has a start and end date and underneath each job there would be rows for individual staff. You would similarly record the days they work in the Start and End date columns.

The columns are a calendar of dates from left to right. Each cell on a row then contains a conditional format which paints the cell if the column date is within the start and end date for that particular job or person.

[danellis]

Thankyou all for your response.

Couple of quick answers and I'll upload some more comprehensive samples over lunch:

By "splitting the programme" it's going to be split across three files. Basically we want to have the three departments each have their own file so different individuals can manage them at the same time, but be able to present them together (so for example the guy managing Production can see that Design work is being done on a project on the Monday, so production work can start on the Tuesday, and that the engineer is on leave Wednesday so can start work Thursday)..

Column A is information about the particular project. Generally it's the numbers of units/dwellings on the scheme, sometimes its the likely submission/deadline date.

dJE

OK,

Attached are three sample files: Production, Design, and Engineering.

I've passed the Gantt chart link to my boss, but expect he'll find it too complicated because of having to set timescales etc. ahead of time.
dJE