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.
Interactive Spreadsheet
Hints
+5 XPno-hints bonusSolve it on your own to keep the bonus. Each hint gets one step closer to the formula.
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 teachesMay contain 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.