Chelsea's job is to track the historical start and end dates for projects within the company. So, she has two columns for each project that specify the start and end dates. Chelsea needs to generate a report that shows, for a target date range, the number of projects that were being worked on for each day within the target range.
Since all that Chelsea needs is a count of projects (and not additional project information), this can be easily accomplished by using a formula that relies on the COUNTIFS function. Let's assume that the project start dates are in column B and the end dates are in column C. In cells F2:F9 you have the dates you want to check. In cell G2 you can use the following formula:
=COUNTIFS(B:B,"<="&F2,C:C,">="&F2)
You can then copy the formula in G2 down as many rows as necessary. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1. Counting projects on a particular date.
The formula used in G2 assumes that the start and end dates are inclusive. If they should not be inclusive, then just drop the equal signs from the formula:
=COUNTIFS(B:B,"<"&F2,C:C,">"&F2)
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