I have to wonder how many people start their time here by begging for help...me certainly, since I've got a bit of a problem in Excel 2003.

The situation is this. I have data from three sites on whether or not particular people were at a given site on a given day (in the form of name, ID number, arrival date, departure date and, by implication, stay duration) and I've been asked to get this into a timeline-esque form. So far, so Gantt chart. However there are a couple of snags.

Firstly, people can (and frequently do!) return to a site after they've left it. To keep the chart useful, I need a way of displaying the stays for each person on the same horizontal line. In effect, I need to get multiple start dates and durations into a single category and have that category defined by a person's name or ID number.

The second complication is that there are three sites, each with data on their own worksheet (arguably four, if you include 'somewhere else') and the ideal outcome is to have all of a particular person's stays displayed as a single line in a single chart. My current plan is to do a chart for each site and then superimpose them - is this viable?

The cherry on top is that, ideally, someone with very basic Excel knowledge could come later to add extra data (name, number, start date and end date) and have the sheet automatically add this into the graph, recognising an existing person if necessary and adding a new line if not (!). This last bit may well be 'no way, no how'...


All help gratefully received.