I'm working for a public access television station (Access SF in San
Francisco). We are trying to create a dynamic schedule using excel (since
Outlook does not contain the functionality we need). The key feature we are
looking for is the ability to create reports/formulas that will tell us how
many hours of a program (or program type) have aired in a given time period.
That is to say, we'd like to be able to ask "How many hours has the program
"Funtime with Chuck and Amy" been on this week/month/quarter/year?", and be
able to get a quick answer without paging back through the calendar and
adding up all the hours that the program was on.

I've created a decent looking weekly schedule using excel, but adding up the
hours of programming is ugly at best. I've created a new column that holds
the hours for each show, but what I'd really like to do is have excel count
this automatically (i.e. if a cell is a merger of 6 cells, it will
automatically be entered as a 3 hour program (since each cell is a half-hour).

In addition, I'd like to be able to color-code the programs by type, and
then be able so, say add up all of the hours of "red" programming in a given
week, day, or month with a single function.

This may simply be beyond the bounds of excel's capabilities (and I am
looking into scheduling software with this capability), but if anyone has
seen something like this done, I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks!

Chris