Not sure what is going to be best
 

I have a spreadsheet where each row represents a shipment. Each shipment has
shipment details in columns A:AP. I want cell AQ to contain the earliest
date from cells X, Z, AB, or AD. As an example for Row 2 I would like it to
look at X2, Z2, AB2, and AD2. Each of those cells will either be blank or
contain a date. If the cells have dates then I want it to return the cell
with the lowest date.

I started writing an IF statement to handle this but because of the
possibility of a blank cell the IF statement was a mile long and by the time
I finished writing it I did wasn't able to completely follow it. There must
be a better function or something that will do this.

Below is an example of data. I am only going to show the columns that I want
to measure

X2 | Z2 | AB | AD | AQ
5/9/08 | 4/5/08 | | 05/01/08 | 04/05/08
04/01/08 | 04/05/08 | 05/01/08 | | 04/01/08
06/06/08 | 06/01/08 | 06/02/08 | 05/30/08 | 05/30/08

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Not sure what is going to be best
 

Hi,

Try =MIN(X2, Z2, AB2,AD2)
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Cheers,
Shane Devenshire


"dustinbrearton via OfficeKB.com" wrote:

I have a spreadsheet where each row represents a shipment. Each shipment has
shipment details in columns A:AP. I want cell AQ to contain the earliest
date from cells X, Z, AB, or AD. As an example for Row 2 I would like it to
look at X2, Z2, AB2, and AD2. Each of those cells will either be blank or
contain a date. If the cells have dates then I want it to return the cell
with the lowest date.

I started writing an IF statement to handle this but because of the
possibility of a blank cell the IF statement was a mile long and by the time
I finished writing it I did wasn't able to completely follow it. There must
be a better function or something that will do this.

Below is an example of data. I am only going to show the columns that I want
to measure

X2 | Z2 | AB | AD | AQ
5/9/08 | 4/5/08 | | 05/01/08 | 04/05/08
04/01/08 | 04/05/08 | 05/01/08 | | 04/01/08
06/06/08 | 06/01/08 | 06/02/08 | 05/30/08 | 05/30/08

--
Message posted via OfficeKB.com
http://www.officekb.com/Uwe/Forums.a...tions/200808/1