I wish that I had a more precisely descriptive title for this question, but I am not very knowledgeable with Excel spreadsheets or VBA (I'm primarily a Java developer, and don't play much in the Microsoft world).
I'm trying to use an Excel spreadsheet to accomplish something. I need to determine whether I can get there with a PivotTable, PivotChart, or some other built-in functionality... or whether I need to go down the path of writing custom VBA code (or maybe using another platform altogether).
The purpose of the spreadsheet is to help create schedules for an organization (a Toastmasters club). This organization has a roster of members, it meets weekly, and various members are assigned to various roles in a given meeting.
My spreadsheet looks like this:
One column... a list of names representing the membership roster.
Each row represents a past meeting date. There are columns for each role, and the cells are to be populated with who served that role on that date. I use Data Validation to have the first tab's roster available inside each cell as a pulldown.
Here's the point of the whole thing. For each of the possible meeting roles, I would like to see which members are the most "overdue" to be assigned for that role. Basically, I want a list of all the club members, sorted in order of how long it's been since they last served that role. People who have never served in that role would be sorted at the top of the list.
Is that third tab data something that can be accomplished with a PivotTable, etc... or am I misunderstanding the purposes and limitations of those tools?
My first instinct is to move you to Access where you can SQL query to your heart's content, but I'm sure this can be done in Access without any custom coding.
=COUNTIF($B3:$B8,$B13)
. i.e. it counts the number of times that "Abe" appears in the Chairperson column of Tab2.=IF(C13>0,VLOOKUP($B13,$B$2:$D$8,3,FALSE),"-")
. i.e. if that person ever served in that role, then it finds the most recent date.=IF(E13>0,VLOOKUP($B13,$C$2:$D$8,2,FALSE),"-")
. The ranges need to be renamed here to satisfy the needs of the Vlookup function (a SQL query would be really convenient here, but Excel doesn't allow that)