I tried doing some searches on my problem, but it is so hard to
summarize in a few keywords. The subject, above, is not very accurately
descriptive, either.
Here is my issue:
I am an engineer in a production environment. We track the Downtime for
the various pieces of equipment that we run. We have a spreadsheet
where the production operators input the equipment data.
Each day has a time column depicting the 24 hours in a day in 15 minute
increments (15min/cell). To the right of the Time coIumn, I have a
column that a production operator is supposed to update every 15
minutes with the current state of the piece of equipment that they are
operating. The operator chooses from a drop down list of Downtime
categories that was created using Data Validation. The sheet has a
default state for the Downtime Categories column.
It is much more conducive to production to have the operators update
the state of the equipment only when an event occurs, not actually
every 15 minutes. So they don't have to keep coming back to the
computer every 15 minutes to update the state of the equipment after
there has been an event and because I don't want them to have to
backfill in the cells between events, I would like to be able to
automatically fill in all the cells below the event with the current
Equipment State category.
Example: The equipment has been running fine for the first 2 hours of a
shift (6-8am). The operator, at the start of the shift, had changed the
Default entry to 'Up'. I would like all the cells below that entry to
change from the Default to 'Up'. Let's say then, after 2 hours the
equipment breaks and needs repairs. The operator would then change the
entry at 8am to 'Equipment Failure'. I would like all the cells, below
8am, to then read 'Equipment Failure'.
How do I do this???????