Decide which support tickets get escalated
One condition on its own would over- or under-escalate — it takes both together to match what the team actually does.
Task:
You triage tickets for a software helpdesk. Any Critical ticket gets escalated to a senior engineer straight away, and so does a High ticket once it has sat open more than 2 days — but a fresh High ticket, or anything Medium or below, just stays with the front line. Work out the call for each ticket in column D.
Learning Objectives:
- Nest AND inside OR to combine an either/or rule with a both/and rule
- See that OR short-circuits on its first true argument, so a Critical ticket never needs to check days open at all
- Tell apart a condition that stands alone (Critical) from one that only matters paired with another (High plus days open)
Solve without hints for +5 XP
Interactive Spreadsheet
The data in this exercise
This is the grid you start with. Cell references in the task — B6, C2 — point at the row numbers and column letters below.
| A | B | C | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ticket | Severity | Days Open | Escalate |
| 2 | TICK-101 | Critical | 1 | |
| 3 | TICK-102 | High | 3 | |
| 4 | TICK-103 | High | 1 | |
| 5 | TICK-104 | Medium | 5 | |
| 6 | TICK-105 | Critical | 0 |
What this exercise teaches (contains the answer)
OR only needs one of its arguments true, so a Critical ticket escalates on the spot regardless of how long it has been open — TICK-105 has been open zero days and still escalates. The second argument to OR is itself an AND, which needs both halves true together: a High ticket alone isn't enough, and three days open alone isn't enough, but High and more than two days open is, which is why TICK-102 escalates and TICK-103 — High but only a day old — does not. Flattening this into a single OR of three conditions would escalate every High ticket immediately, defeating the point of grading it against how long it has sat.