Can excel count concurrent events given start and end times ?
 

Hi there. I have a spreadsheet with thousands of phone call records. Each
has a start time, and end time and of course, therefore, a duration. I want
to get excel to tell me how many concurrent calls there are.

How do I do it ?

Any help greatfully received.

Charlie

Answer: Can excel count concurrent events given start and end times ?
 

Hi Charlie,

Yes, Excel can definitely count concurrent events given start and end times. Here's how you can do it:

1. First, make sure your data is organized in a table with columns for start time and end time.
2. Create a new column next to the end time column and label it "Concurrent Calls".
3. In the first cell of the Concurrent Calls column, enter the formula
   Formula:

   ---

   "=COUNTIFS(Start Time,"<="&End Time,End Time,"="&Start Time)" 


   ---

   (without the quotes).
4. Copy this formula down to all the cells in the Concurrent Calls column.
5. The formula will count the number of calls that have a start time less than or equal to the end time of the current call, and an end time greater than or equal to the start time of the current call. This will give you the number of concurrent calls at any given time.
6. You can then use Excel's filtering or sorting functions to analyze the data and find the maximum number of concurrent calls, or any other information you need.

Can excel count concurrent events given start and end times ?
 

First question - of these thousands of phone calls, are they all on the same
day or are numerous days represented on the sheet?

If more than one day is represented on the sheet, is the DATE of the call
recorded as part of the start/end time of the call or somewhere else on the
same row with the start end time?

You're essentially asking Excel to take each date and compare it to all
other dates and tell you how many others were going on at the same time -
that's not going to work well if multiple days are involved unless you can
distinguish the dates.

It might be better if you set up a group of time ranges, down to whatever
granularity you need and ask what calls were concurrent on a given day during
those time periods.

"Charlie B" wrote:

Hi there. I have a spreadsheet with thousands of phone call records. Each
has a start time, and end time and of course, therefore, a duration. I want
to get excel to tell me how many concurrent calls there are.

How do I do it ?

Any help greatfully received.

Charlie

Can excel count concurrent events given start and end times ?
 

Yesterday I stared at this for about an hour trying to figure it out.
JLatham's point about your desired granularity is an important one,
since it is an important aspect of your solution. I made some
assumptions about "down to the minute" granularity and tried to
develop a way to determine calls originating during a particular
minute and calls that were ongoing during a particular minute, and
couldn't get the logic down, and then couldn't devote more time to it.

The best I can figure right now is to calculate calls in progress
during a particular time frame by listing for each call the start and
end time; use your desired time granularity as headers across columns;
then use IF statements to determine if a call is in progress during a
given time period. If TRUE then return 1 in a given cell, and at the
bottom of the column sum all the 1s. That's not very elegant, tho,
hopefully one of the resident geniuses can respond with a better
method.

Can excel count concurrent events given start and end times ?
 

Assuming you have call data with start date/time and end date/time
(i.e. start date/time + duration), one way of doing this is to create
TWO records for every call record. One record to contain START date/
time and an indicator set to "S", and the second to contain END date/
time and an indicator set to "E".

Merge the two sets of records together and sort by date/time in
ascending sequence. If the S/E indicator is in column C, and assuming
first record is in row 2, then in column D row 2 add the formula:

=IF(C2="S",D1+1,D1-1)

and replicate this formula downwards to all other records (cell D1
should be initialised to 0). Column D should then contain the number
of simultaneous calls at any one time. You can easily determine the
maximum number (using the MAX function) AND the number of times that
this number, and every lower number, was reached (using the COUNTIF
function).

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Sep 17, 5:56 pm, Charlie B <Charlie
wrote:
Hi there. I have a spreadsheet with thousands of phone call records. Each
has a start time, and end time and of course, therefore, a duration. I want
to get excel to tell me how many concurrent calls there are.

How do I do it ?

Any help greatfully received.

Charlie