need help with charting, scheduling plan

[WhyKnot]

Can anyone get me started in the right direction for this project?

I have to follow approximately 250-300 people for a period of 20 months in
terms of them coming to a prescribed number of appointments and completing
phone calls between the actual visits. Each one of these visits and calls
MUST occur within a certain range of time, or in other words, a "window" and
the windows are based on their previous appointment date with varying time
frame from Visit 1, Visit 2, etc. For example, Visit 2 must be 20-30 days
from Visit 1, Visit 3 must be 30-48 days from Visit 2, Visit 4 must be
100-140 days from Visit 3, and so on.

Each person will have their own 20 month plan, dependent on when they had
their first visit, but all must complete sequential visits and phone calls
according the prescribed windows of time. So the titles of the column of
the database or spreadsheet I end up using will be the visits which have to
occur (the only constant), however, each cell must have a formula with a
range of acceptable dates for the appointment and then THAT range data will
be replaced with the actual date the visit occurred, and so on.

I not only need to have a scheduling plan but I also have to manage this
group on the same chart to track when they actually come in (as a single
date, obviously, which will replace the range of dates) while keeping the
rest of their data with ranges of dates as ongoing in subsequent columns.

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[JulieD]

Hi

few questions -

what is the total number of visits / phone calls that relate to each
individual person over the 20 months?

how are you going to determine ranges of dates based on other ranges of
dates (in the planning period), e.g. visit 3 must be 30-48 days based on
visit 2 spaning 20-30 days? so if visit 1 is planned for 1 Aug 2004 then
visit 2 would be 21 - 31 August and then visit 3 would be 21 August + 30
days or 48 days or would the 30/48 days be based on the 31 August - if you
see what i mean. You can create a range of dates based on a single date but
i'm not sure how you are going to do it based on a range of dates - unless
you choose best / middle or worse case scenario.

what happens if someone misses the prescribed window - how are you going to
track when they should have come in vs when they did?

do you also need to present this information in any sort of graphical way or
do you need it purely as a list of dates?

what other information do you need to store alongside the date information?

cheers
JulieD