Ok, to start with I am not an excel expert at all, so this may not be a challenge at all. Here is the situation: I just got given a new collateral duty in my unit that requires a whole lot of weekly excel crunching all for one specific end: tracking who has filed their paperwork for coded events they completed. I was handed down a sort of cobbled together set of excel files that take two databases and compare them. The first database is a computer output that tracks personnel in the rows, and the columns are coded event numbers. The computer tracks when the events are actually completed, and fills the appropriate row and column with a date stamp.

The second excel file is one that I have to daily update where I take physical paper copies of event reports, find the appropriate row and column for the person and event, and input the completion date.

Now the especially fun part. There is a program that compares the two files, and if the files have a difference, ie an event was done in file A but no paperwork was ever submitted and file B doesn't have that row and column filled with the completion date, then it turns the deficient square in file B red. If file A and B both show a square empty, then its square remains white. If file A and B are filled, it turns green. I then have to manually comb through all the data every week, find all the red squares, and manually type the name of the deficient person and event code into a separate tab that I then print out and disseminate.

I already have a 70 hour a week job and I was hoping that it might be possible to write some simple code to search for red colored squares and spit out a list of the name and event codes, which are the row and column headers for those playing at home.

Any thoughts? Is it even possible to identify squares by color through code? I'm willing to do the legwork and try to learn to code this myself if it could bear fruit, but I can't spare the hours to learn how to code excel if its just going to a dead end over something like that.

Anyhow, I hope that someone out there is willing to help point me in the right direction!

Thanks in advance for anyone kind enough to spare some time for my little puzzle.