Formating Dates for production schedule
 

I have a production schedule within an excel document. I have a start date
and a release date. Between these dates I have different dates that
represent deliverys, approvals and review dates. These dates are sometimes
changed due to weather, client issues, etc. Everytime I have to change a
date, I have to look at a calendar and make the changes in each cell after
the first change.

Is there a way to format all the cells after the first start date, so if I
change one date, all dates after that will change the same amount of days,
leaving out weekends and national holidays.

Take into consideration that the dates listed are not in order. I.e. (Start
Date 1/17, send 1st round layouts 1/21, get client approval 1/24, etc)

Any help would be appriciated. Cheers.

If you include a column that represents duration in days for each
aspect of the project, subsequent dates after the start date could
simply be a formula. The date for each task in the project could be
the date for the previous task plus the number of days for the current
task.

For instance: suppose column A is your task description, column B is
the duration in days, and column C is the due date for the current
task. Suppose the entry in A1 is "Start Date" and the entry in C1 is
1/17/2005 (from your example). The next task, in A2, is "Send first
round layouts", the duration in B2 is 4, and the formula in cell C2 is
=WORKDAY(C1+B2,D1:D10)
.... where D1:D10 is a list of holidays. The WORKDAY() function returns
the date of a weekday that is the number of days (specified in B2)
after a startdate (C1).

By linking each tasks due date to the prior tasks due date, your
schedule becomes dynamic. If a date slips then you can either hardcode
the date or adjust the number of days for that task to match, and
subsequent dates will adjust.