Forum Discussion
Choose MAX date from several columns, based on TODAY's DATE
I haven't been involved (or my memory fails me) in any of your prior date-related questions. And I'm definitely not at the expertise level of @Sergei Baklan, but...all those disclaimers aside, when I look at your spreadsheet it strikes me as a strange design.
By that I mean, something seems to be missing: it refers to people, right? To stages of processing an application for something or other? Where is the ID (yes, it has to be anonymous here on this website)? So I assume you've either left it off intentionally, or there's something else going on.
And all that said, I wonder why you don't create a table that has
- a column for a unique identifier for each person (student ID, ssn, whatever...some unique ID)
- Date (of action or status),
- Status Code (to correspond to those Stages across the top of your sheet)
From a table like that at the INPUT end of things, you'd be able quite readily to generate an OUTPUT report that resembles your current spreadsheet.
In short, what you have appears to me at any rate (and I could be wrong) as an output or report, in which you're requiring that you (or some other user) do the "heavy lifting" of figuring out which row and column to add a new date to in order to track the history of somebody. You may, I realize, be asking that Excel do the relatively trivial work of filling in your last column (getting the max date and giving a Stage description). But in fact, THIS is precisely the kind of output/report that Excel excels in producing from a simple database or Excel Table such as I describe above.
So my question, as we await @Sergei Baklan's input, is whether or not you'd be open to a different way of tracking this history and reporting on it?
