creating a fairly complicated calendar

I'm attempting to create a scheduling calendar in Excel 2007 (but it needs to be compatible with 2003) and I could use some help.

It's going to be used for work purposes and what I'm trying to setup is one main calendar and then one secondary calendar for each project in my group. I really don't care if they all reside on one sheet or multiple sheets.

The main calendar is primarily going to be used as a quick overview of what is going on in the entire group. The calendar will consist of dates across the top row and names down the first column. The basic calendar setup will be the same for each of them.

The ultimate goal is for each manager to be able to schedule people on their own project's calendar and then have Excel reflect these inputs on the main calendar. In other words, if a manager (using their calendar for project A) schedules employee 1 to be working on June 1, it will show employee 1 working on June 1 on the main calendar.

That part isn't that bad, and I've been able to get some rudimentary working version of it up and sort of functional. The part that takes it beyond my capabilities is that I also need it to designate that employee as unavailable for those dates on each of the other project calendars.

For example, using the previous example, employee 1 would be shown (either via an X, conditional formatting to make the cell red or some other designation) as being unavailable on each of the other project calendars.

I've tried all the ways I can think of to make this work, but I always end up with circular formula errors.

If anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate them. Thanks for the help.

Sounds like you want to buy Microsoft Project.

ChemistB