Well, I won't pay the dollars (could amount to a couple hundred bucks) but the company I work for will.

Now, right up front, I'll try and talk you out of this.

I have an Excel spreadsheet that is truly a work of art -- it is a contract form with graphics, validation checks, warning messages, instruction popups, all that kind of good stuff. An extremely talented and capable friend and I have been working on and improving this form for more than a year now. It is fully developed, bug-free, and has been in daily use for at least a year.

Did I mention that it was complex?

Just to give you a hint of what you would be getting into, here is one of the formulas in the spreadsheet:

=IF(NOT(ISERROR(SEARCH("FLEX[",X18))),VALUE(MID(X18,
SEARCH("FLEX[",X18)+5,SEARCH("]",X18)-(SEARCH
("FLEX[",X18)+5))), IF(AH18>1,
(ROUNDUP((INT((F18-B18+1)/7)*(AH18-1)/AH18),0)
*(Q18+R18+S18+T18+U18+V18+W18)) + D117,
(ROUNDUP(INT((F18-B18+1)/7),0)
*(Q18+R18+S18+T18+U18+V18+W18)) + D117))

(I added some line feeds to split the above into separate lines so it would display better on the bbs.)

The complexity of the formula above isn't even the biggest part of the problem. I wish I could take credit for that formula, but it was written entirely by my partner in crime who is also a member of this bbs, and I can sort of understand the concepts in it but could never have written it myself.

If you were to take this on, I would have to educate you in some of the arcane aspects of the broadcast business, such as Skip Week scheduling, the Standard Broadcast Calendar, and why March 28 is really in April.

As stated before, the spreadsheet is complete and workable, except for one final feature that we have been unable to implement. Indeed, we haven't even been able to come up with a viable plan of attack. Simple enough in concept (just total up the dollars and allocate them by months) but not in practice. Before you decide, "Well, that should be easy enough..." take another look at that formula and ask yourself if someone could do that but can't do this, could it really be that easy?

Now, it is quite possible that a fresh set of eyes will look at it and see a simple, obvious method of doing it that will make us slap our heads and say "Doh!". An even better possibility is that the task can be run externally and called by the spreadsheet. The caveat here is that we cannot live with Excel's paranoia that pops up a warning messaage that requires action on the part of the user if the spreadsheet contains a macro. It has to be done in such a way that you click on the program shortcut icon and it opens the spreadsheet.

Any takers? Contact me by email burnside at alaska dot net or by pm. You may learn things about Excel that you never knew before. I certainly did.

tanstaafl.