Counting cells based on their colour and other criteria

Question

I'm working on some rostering functions in Excel, with the basis being that we have a limited number of people that will need to be rostered-on for work, covering shifts at multiple sites

When planning the rosters, we use a simple set of coloured cells to fill-in for when people are on dayshift, nightshift, not-rostered, annual leave, etc. Given that there are multiple sites we plan for I need to have a quick formula that checks whether that individual has been rostered-on for simultaneous shifts at multiple sites (obviously not possible), so we can easily identify when there is a conflict in the planning stage. The formula needs to return a TRUE, or value (eg. count >1 means more than one assignment for that person) so that I can use either conditional formatting or VBA to highlight a cell/the row and draw attention to the conflict

What I've tried doing is summing/counting cells that are coloured with a few VBA methods:

Function ISFILLED(MyCell As Range)
    If MyCell.Interior.colorIndex > 0 Then
        Result = True
    Else
        Result = False
    End If
    ISFILLED = Result
End Function

and/or:

Function ColorFunction(rColor As Range, rRange As Range, Optional SUM As Boolean)
    Dim rCell As Range
    Dim lCol As Long
    Dim vResult
    lCol = rColor.Interior.ColorIndex
    If SUM = True Then
        For Each rCell In rRange
            If rCell.Interior.ColorIndex = lCol Then
                vResult = WorksheetFunction.SUM(rCell, vResult)
            End If
        Next rCell
    Else
        For Each rCell In rRange
            If rCell.Interior.ColorIndex = lCol Then
                vResult = 1 + vResult
            End If
        Next rCell
    End If
    ColorFunction = vResult
End Function

These both work fine on their own but I'm unable to combine this with a SUMIFS/COUNTIFS style function to only count the number of cells that are coloured when that individual's name appears against that assignment.

If you have a look in the sample image from the roster, you can see that Joe Bloggs 4 has been assigned a shift at both Site 1 and Site 2 on the 21/05/2014. What I'm after is essentially to count number of coloured cells on row, if the individuals name matching the criteria is against those cells . For this example if would be

=COUNTIFS(C8:AQ8, "Joe Bloggs 4", C12:AQ12, *Cell is Coloured*)

Colour of the cell doesn't matter (hence the first function ISFILLED is better as i don't need a reference cell for the fill), as it's just a sense-check.

Appreciate any help/pointers, as it is, I'm stuck!

Answer 1

You won't be able to use SUMIFS and COUNTIFS for this. You need something along these lines:

Function IsFilledArr(rng As Range) As Variant
    Dim i As Long, j As Long
    Dim v As Variant
    ReDim v(1 To rng.Rows.Count, 1 To rng.Columns.Count)
    For i = 1 To rng.Rows.Count
        For j = 1 To rng.Columns.Count
            v(i, j) = rng.Cells(i, j).Interior.ColorIndex > 0
        Next j
    Next i
    IsFilledArr = v
End Function

This UDF can be called as an array formula, ie select a range of cells, type the formula in the top-left cell (while the whole range is still selected), and then press Ctrl - Shift - Enter . Then you can operate on the returned array, eg SUM it.

Example usage:

where the -- double minus converts Boolean TRUE/FALSE values (which are not summable) into 1's and 0's (which are).

I'll let you adapt this to suit your particular requirements.

EDIT: You want more:

calculate the number of filled cells in column C, where there was an adjacent filled cell in column B - in this case C4 would be the only cell that met that criteria.

This formula will do the trick (entered as an array formula):

=SUM(IF(IsFilledArr(B2:B7)+IsFilledArr(C2:C7)>1,1))

Note the use of SUM(IF(...,1)) to mimic COUNT . That is the way to do it when you're dealing with array formulas.

Read more here: http://www.cpearson.com/excel/ArrayFormulas.aspx

You asked for help/pointers; this should hopefully be more than enough to get you unstuck. You can adapt this approach to meet whatever you exact needs are.