Check for value on a by person by month basis.

[MRHF]

I'm an analyst for a website, and I'm trying to track activity for all of our authors month to month. The data I have available is a monthly breakout of any post that received a page view in that month, with the reporting month (the month the page view occurred in), the original post date, and the author's name.

See the dummy data I put together to test with. Basically, if Moe has any post that was published in June, then he was active in that month and every post in the reporting month of June needs to be marked as Active so those page views can be added together. If not, then Moe was inactive that month.

I can easily check if a post is new by doing an If(reporting month = published month), and I know how to search a column for a value (I did an if(countif)) to search for the new post value). What I'm struggling with is a way to limit that check so that it looks at it on a by author by month basis. I would need a formula that can check if it's only looking at one author in one month before looking to see if there was a new post, and I just can't figure out how to do that.

Thanks in advance for any tips.

[pjwhitfield]

At the moment each row in column G will always be the same because you're simply saying "If theres a 1 anywhere in column D then make it active.

Can you amend your spreadsheet to show what you expect to see in column G? eg if you expect Row 2 should be Inactive or row 5 active etc, that will give us a better idea of what you want (and makes testing a whole lot easier!).

Although on reflection, I believe this in column G should do it.

=IF(COUNTIFS(A:A,A2,B:B,B2,D:D,1),"Active","Inactive")

[MRHF]

Thanks for your reply. Column G should mimic column E, which I manually keyed in to represent what I want the results to look like. That formula seems to work, I didn't realize you could have multiple criteria at once like that. I'll definitely test this on a larger scale, but that's an amazingly simple formula that solves my problem if it works!