I am currently working on developing our Excel spreadsheets so that we do not miss any training course deadlines. I am looking to design the 'best fit' spreadsheet. We can have over 150+ courses a year to co-ordinate from our spreadsheets with 4+ deadlines per course.

Is there a way of logging on to a spreadsheet and having prompts which immediately display the nearest deadlines.

Or a way you would recommend setting up a spreadsheet to best get this information eg> Course 1 Deadline 1/2/3/4 Course 2 Deadline 1/2/3/4.

Now Course 1 Deadline 1 will occur first, then Course 2 Deadline 1. However, in a spreadsheet with approx 10 - 15 courses per month, you just end up with a load of deadlines that you switch between. Moving back and forth between deadlines for different courses.

So is there a way to prompt? Prioritise? Or is a spreadsheet re-design in order?

have you tried using IF statements

No, how do I do that?

We cover this on our Excel Advanced course. To get a good overview of the way IF Statements work, look in the Help section of Excel.

Essentially an IF statement evaluates the contents of a cell, and returns a value based on your input into the statement.

EG:

Basic syntax:
=IF (evaluation criteria, true_statement, false_statement)

So if you wanted to know if the value in a cell (B7) is greater than 300 (criteria), then you could use the following formula.

=IF (B7>300, "yes, greater than 300", "NO, less than 300")